of the current thinking on the air defense side I think is in line with that, too.
Army AL&T: In the context of BBP, you’ve said that it’s hard to eliminate unproductive and bureaucratic processes because of comfortable habits of years and even decades. What sort of a culture shift do you think will be necessary for meaningful acquisition reform to take hold in the Army specifically?
ADVANCE AWARENESS
Speaking alongside the MV Cape Ray in Portsmouth, VA, Jan. 2, 2014, Kendall discusses the ship’s mission to destroy chemical weapons from Syria. The ship traveled to the Mediterranean Sea to neutralize mustard gas and a component of the nerve agent sarin, using two rapidly developed field deployable hydrolysis systems. (See related article on Page 144.) DOD anticipated and prepared for the mission, starting in early 2013, in recognition “that something was going to happen in Syria, in all likelihood that would require us to do something with those chemical materials that were known to be there,” Kendall said. (U.S. Army photo by C. Todd Lopez)
in key areas where technology’s moving more quickly, and where we control inter- faces so the government has the ability to introduce competition for some of those things, as opposed to being a captive of a source that we select for the primary development.
So there are a lot of things that we can do to add flexibility. It has to be thought about, it has to be designed in and it has to be paid for. Tis isn’t free. Tere are cost impacts of doing this. We can’t escape ultimately the fact that large-scale, complicated things take a while to get through development. Just going through the design process, fabricating prototypes and doing testing takes time. But you can design into those products the ability to be more agile, and you can design into your process the ability to make changes as necessary while you’re going through development.
You’ve got to be a little bit careful about that, because if requirements are con- stantly changing, you’re always chasing them, and you never get a design that you settle on as you get into the field. And we’ve had that experience in the past a few times.
Army AL&T: Are there specific examples where you think the Army has succeeded in building in flexibility to acquisition?
Kendall: I think it’s a work in progress. Tere’s been some flexibility built into how they proceeded with the WIN-T [Warfighter Information Network – Tac- tical] program, where they’ve responded to facts on the ground plus budget real- ity to try to get to the right place there. I think [Army Acquisition Executive] Heidi Shyu is well aware that [the Army] needs to do this and she’s trying to structure programs so that they can do that. Some
Kendall: I was referring as much to OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] as the services when I made that comment. Tere are very deeply ingrained ways of doing business, ways of doing staffing in particular. And I think this is just as true in the services as it is in OSD, including the Army, where an awful lot of, I’ll call them stakeholders, feel that they have to have a certain degree of influence over what goes on. And I think that getting that streamlined has really been a strug- gle. And getting it focused on substantive things has been a struggle.
Tere’s kind of a compliance mentality where people have a list of things they expect to see, and if they don’t see them, that’s a problem—as opposed to being focused on what are we really trying to accomplish here and what actually mat- ters in terms of the substance of what we’re doing, as opposed to the rule set, if you will.
Army AL&T: Could you be a little bit more specific about that mode of thinking?
Kendall: Yeah, I get a fair amount of pro- grams that come in, and what are raised as issues are, “Is the baseline current?” and “Are the LRIP [low-rate initial pro- duction] quantities still the same?” and “Are we going to have a Nunn-McCurdy [exceed, by at least 15 percent, a program’s
ASC.ARMY.MIL 19
ACQUISITION
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