There are people who, I think, like to be told what to do. Frankly, they’re not the people we need leading our programs. We need people who have good judgment and have a good basis for making the judgments that they have to make based on their experience and training and so on.
any circumstances. Tat’s a different part of what we do. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of establishing both tracks and making them both work more effectively.
Army AL&T: Does this borrow at all from the much-vaunted special forces acquisition methods?
Kendall: Te special forces people do a good job of acquiring niche capabilities relatively quickly. Tey focus on core requirements. And a lot of what they do is personal equipment or modifications to existing equipment that can be done on a relatively quick basis, and they do it in small quantities. Tey’re flexible about some of the environmental requirements that we have to worry about. I think that works well for them, and we can do the same thing.
What we’re doing in rapid acquisition is very similar to that in many cases. I wouldn’t say it was modeled on the SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Com- mand] model, but it’s very similar.
Army AL&T: We wanted to ask that because there is a lot of talk about how SOCOM acquisition is the answer to everything.
Kendall: Unfortunately it’s not. And the reason it’s not is that some of the key warfighting systems that we buy, some of the things that really provide us with
core capabilities are very large, complex and inherently long programs that need a lot of careful management to be suc- cessful. One of the principal things that has to be managed in that process is risk. And before we embark on a $10-or-more billion development program, we need to do risk mitigation in many cases to ensure that we’ve got the technology risks in particular, and in some cases manufacturing risks, under control and where we need them to be.
So you need a phase that does that for those large-scale programs. And I’m talking about things like the next- generation fighter, the next-generation bomber, the next-generation surface combatant, maybe
the next-generation
combat vehicle, where you’re trying to get a substantive leap ahead in capabil- ity, a quantum improvement in capability relative to anything else that exists in the world or that you anticipate existing in the world.
Now these are the things that give us technological superiority at the end of the day. And they inherently involve more risk. So that’s a different world, frankly, than the world that SOCOM lives in. Tey don’t do that sort of thing.
Army AL&T: What’s your assessment of where the United States stands in tech- nical superiority, compared with our adversaries?
Kendall: I’m very concerned about that. I’ve been concerned about it for years now. I’ve done testimony about this, I’ve written about it. I’ve given speeches about it. I think that people are probably tired of hearing me talk about it. But as I look at the intel data on what some foreign countries are doing—particu- larly China; to a lesser extent, Russia; and even countries like Iran—they’re acquiring capabilities that are designed to defeat the United States.
China, in particular, is doing so very aggressively. It’s building counter-space capabilities to attack our space assets. It’s building capabilities to attack our aircraft carriers and our air bases. It’s build- ing capabilities to take us on in the air with things like electronic warfare and advanced air-to-air weapons, and very capable air defenses. And the China I’m looking at now is nothing like the China I looked at 20 years ago when I left the department. We have a big problem here. While we’re doing sequestration and cut- ting our budgets and [are] very, very busy around the world with a lot of real, right- now problems with extremist groups and so on, we are in a situation where we are losing ground. And I think we are losing ground to a dangerous degree relative to potential future adversaries and to the technologies that they might field to oth- ers or sell to others.
Army AL&T: Can you address the limi- tations of what incremental upgrades can do, engineering change proposals and that sort of thing? Is DOD research and development [R&D] really suffering with the cuts in funding?
Kendall: Yes, absolutely, and if you look at the structure—we were at a high of over $80 billion and now we’re down more in the $65 billion category. We were even lower than that. Tat’s in our request.
ASC.ARMY.MIL 21
ACQUISITION
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