A NEW ERA OF ACQUISITION
Mac Tornberry, R-Texas, chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees—began to “really start push- ing on the system by not only pushing the new [expedited acquisition] author- ities, but also pushing at organizational changes,” said Jon Etherton, president of Etherton and Associates Inc., a defense policy and business strategy consulting firm. Etherton is a veteran of the defense legislative process, having served nearly two decades as a senior Senate staffer.
Te result was an unprecedented volume of legislation in Title 8, the acquisition policy portion of the National Defense Authori- zation Act.
Milestone decision-making on major programs shifted unequivocally from DOD back to the services with the elimination of the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics. “You had the creation of all these new author- ities like Section 804 and the expansion of the other transaction agreements,” to
which DOD has responded with enthusi- asm, said Etherton.
“What I’ve really seen is, with the new administration in particular, they really want to grab onto some of these things,” Etherton said. “… And I think the Army has been right in the middle of this, especially at the front end of the decision-making,” to start much more rapidly getting on contract and getting the actual work started, with Army Futures Command putting the major players together at the beginning of the process rather than waiting for each to do its part sequentially.
As a result, “we can really start to figure out what works, what doesn’t work—reduce risk and get a much more accelerated process going for some of these efforts,” Etherton said.
ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION As Naval Postgraduate School senior lecturer John T. Dillard sees it, the most
significant change in acquisition to emerge from the past few years of legis- lation was the elimination of the defense undersecretary position. “Whatever drove that decision, it has certainly reduced the amount of preparation and documen- tation that program managers must go through for milestone decisions to proceed, halt or alter the course of their programs,” Dillard said.
Defense Acquisition Board reviews were mandated, highly costly and work- intensive “off-core activities” for any Acquisition Category ID project, said Dillard, who managed major weapons development efforts for most of his 26-year career in the Army and now teaches in the Naval Postgraduate School’s Systems Engineering Department of the Gradu- ate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “Tey were only the tip of the iceberg with regard to preparatory reviews en route, and were a significant distrac- tion to the [program manager] that pulled them away from their primary functions.”
SECRETARIAT ON THE ROAD
Hon. Ellen M. Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, meets with key staff members of the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq in November. Joint Task Force Iraq Commander Brig. Gen. William Seely briefed current and future plans in regard to joint operations. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Desmond Cassell/Maj. Charles Dietz)
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Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2020
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