PROGRESS REPORT
What is happening, as we go through budget deliberations and reach compro- mises and so on, is we end up, because of near-term requirements, covering our deployed forces, emphasizing readiness and force structure over modernization. And in particular, I’m concerned about our pipeline of new products. When I compare the data on the pipeline of new products to the pipeline, again, of China, it is dramatically different. We are essen- tially digging a hole for ourselves, and we’re forced into that by the resource lev- els that we’re at. Uncertainty about those resource levels has a big impact, because there’s a tendency in that environment to hang on to force structure that we ultimately may not be able to afford. It prevents us from confronting some of the choices we may have to make.
So, getting some stability in our budget so we have some kind of idea of what to anticipate is critical. When we submit a budget that may be $40 billion, $35 bil- lion above what we’re actually going to get at the end of the day, that leads to huge distortions in our planning and in how we allocate resources. We really have to get this resolved. It’s really crippling the department.
Army AL&T: Are the services doing any- thing in a smaller way to keep up the pace of incremental improvements?
Kendall: Tere’s a lot more of that going on, because we’re forced to do it. Te big- gest part of our R&D account right now is the upgrades to existing programs. We’re doing a lot to keep things around longer than we had initially intended, and where we can, we’re upgrading some of those things. Te Bradley and the M1 in the Army, for example, are good examples of that. Te one thing that we have been able to protect in the budgets, we’ve chosen to protect, is the science and technology accounts. So the basic work that will give us programs in the field 20 years from now, maybe, or 30 years from now—we’re protecting that. It’s the effort that’s going to give us capabilities in 10 or 15 years that we’re shortchanging right now.
Army AL&T: You’ve stated that you’d like to leave as a legacy a stronger and more professional Defense Acquisition Workforce. Why is this legacy so impor- tant to you, and what are the programs you’ve put in place to establish that?
Kendall: When I look at the history of defense acquisition,
it’s almost
I would like to keep some of our best talent around. I’m looking for ways we might do that. I see too many of our best program managers at the grade roughly of O-6, colonel or maybe captain, leaving because they don’t make it to the star level in their service.
impos-
sible to correlate any policy change with improvement. What I’ve tried to do over the last several years and will keep doing is to make a lot of policy changes and a lot of practice changes that make incre- mental improvement. So I’m hoping that those will, when you knit them together, have a substantial impact. But I’m also very interested in improving the capa- bility of our key leaders in acquisition to make good decisions, which is basically their professionalism.
Now we have a very professional work- force. I don’t by any means want to say anything negative about it; it’s a great
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workforce, and I’m very proud to be part of it. But we can all improve. I can improve, everybody can improve. And I think [that includes] strengthening that workforce and creating a culture in which people are allowed to make those decisions, in which senior leadership out- side the acquisition community listens to acquisition professionals about technical risk and about what it will really take to deliver a program, and heeds that advice. So I think it’s a long, slow process to build up that sort of capability in any workforce, but I think we’re making progress there. And we’re going to keep at it as long as I’m in this position.
Army AL&T: Do you see any sort of end point in that progress?
Kendall: No. Te whole idea of continu- ous improvement is that there are always ways that you can improve. You’re never perfect. And I made the analogy to foot- ball, in a five-page paper I did for Sens. McCain [John McCain, R-AZ] and Levin [now-retired Sen. Carl Levin, D-MI] in a compendium they put together. We’re in a competitive game here, and if you think of the acquisition people as basi- cally a football team, all the players have to be as good as they possibly can be. Te other team’s trying to be as good as they can possibly be, too. And you never get to an end state. You’re always trying to get better, you’re always reacting to what the other guys are doing.
And you have to do everything right. You’ve got to recruit well, you have to train well, you have to plan well, you have to execute well in everything that you do. Tat’s in a sense an unattainable end state, but that’s what you strive for. You strive for that continuously, and you keep working for constant improvement.
Army AL&T Magazine April–June 2015
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