COMMENTARY
victim of our size. When former Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Tech- nology and Logistics) Ashton Carter stood up his Strategic Capabilities Office, many saw it as an attempt to form a smaller unit, outside of the very large efforts and bureaucracy that he oversaw, that could move system developments forward. If our existing internal management processes and organizational structure and culture cannot adapt to change in the current era, national security may well be at risk.
2. Relaxation of acquisition policy and the implications of service-level milestone-decision authority. As the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 eliminated the position of undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, and, presum- ably, a lot of oversight at the level of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the milestone-decision authority for the programs to produce our developing systems now rests largely with our Army leaders. Looking back, the Goldwater- Nichols legislation in the 1980s gave us the program executive office (PEO) structure and streamlined the chain of command for major system program managers. But the service and OSD-level staff bureau- cracy remained, in what was essentially a centralized decision-making mode.
Over the years, we voiced to congressional staffers that it wasn’t more legislation that was needed to speed acquisition so much as more decentralized decision-making. Our DOD Instruction 5000 series acquisition regulations espoused program managers having more responsibility, but the pleth- ora of meetings and “rings to be kissed” (bureaucrats to be satisfied) en route to
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
The Army’s urgently needed modernization of its “Big 6” priorities requires an organizational culture supporting prudence and creativity to make the most of about $60 billion designated for the effort over the next five years, and that’s just for the early phases of development. (Graphic by USAASC)
a decision were extremely burdensome and even disruptive, with many “powers of no.” Frustrated, former Army Acquisi- tion Executive (AAE) Heidi Shyu called this “too many cooks in the kitchen” and often used a cartoon of a bus driven by a PM, with each passenger having their own brake pedal and steering wheel. Again, she
saw that our own management culture appeared to be more oriented to permis- sion than progress, resulting in hindrance.
Today, an entire layer of bureaucracy has presumably been reduced, except that the overseers are still there in the Pentagon, offering advice and healthy skepticism for
organization believes to be true.
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