‘GROUNDHOG DAY’ ALL OVER AGAIN


PLUS ÇA CHANGE Te French saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” could be the defini- tion of defense acquisition reform: Te more things change, the more they stay the same.


But since it’s not, it makes sense to define acquisition reform, which isn’t quite so simple, as the RAND Corp. pointed out in its 2005 study “Reexamining Military Acquisition Reform: Are We Tere Yet?” But RAND punted that ball even as it ran with it, with a report maintaining that acquisition reform is essentially in the eye of the beholder. “We elected to treat ‘acquisition reform’ as being defined by whatever specific initiatives we could identify that were formally launched and pursued under the banner of ‘Acquisition Reform.’ ”


During the 1980s, “Are We Tere Yet?” states, acquisition reform meant “putting controls in place to reduce ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ (both real and perceived) in transactions with contractors.” In the 1990s, the report adds, acquisition reform meant attempts to “make the acquisition process more responsive, effective, and efficient.”


In the Center for Strategic and Interna- tional Studies’ “Measuring the Outcomes of Acquisition Reform by Major DOD


Components,” acquisition reform falls out similarly. “Historical reforms have ranged from efforts targeting perceived waste, fraud, and abuse in the 1980s, to a focus on streamlining overly rigid mili- tary specifications and processes in the 1990s, to a focus on transformational technologies under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the 2000s.”


In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee


in 2013, Moshe


Schwartz, a specialist in defense acquisi- tion, said, “Efforts to address cost overruns, schedule slips, and performance short- falls have continued unabated, with more than 150 major studies on acquisition reform since World War II. Every admin- istration and virtually every secretary of defense has been a party to an acquisi- tion reform effort. Congress has also been active in pursuing reform efforts, by legislating changes through the annual National Defense Authorization Acts as well as through stand-alone legislation, such as the Federal Acquisition Stream- lining Act of 1994, Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996, and the Weapon System Acquisi- tion Reform Act of 2009.”


Yet, while waste, fraud and abuse haven’t been in the news much of late, cost is still an issue. Current reform proposals— an iterative approach from the House Armed Services Committee and a more


“If you take government program managers and they are dealing with dedicated and experienced corporate program managers on the industry side, I think very often the government people are outgunned.”


structural one from the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), which have yet to complete the reconciliation process and both of which President Obama has threatened to veto—combine the desire to make


acquisition cheaper imperative to make it faster.


“Cost is still an issue,” said Jon Etherton of Etherton and Associates Inc. in an interview with Army AL&T in July. “I guarantee that, if we have a program that suddenly were to have serious overruns or other kinds of things that people would consider to be out of control, cost would be back on the front burner.” Etherton is a respected acquisition authority, having


and the


REFORMING ACQUISITION: A TIMELINE


1945-2015 16


The history of acquisition reform is marked by hundreds of important dates and events—more than we have space for, unfortunately. We’ve distilled the past 60 years into the pivotal items you see in the timeline that runs across the bottom of the following pages. What history writes next remains to be seen.


1947 National Security Act


• Re-forming the War Department into the Department of Defense and Joint Staff.


Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2016


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