WHAT


UNDERSTANDING LOOKS LIKE


Understanding Army acquisition is hard. Depicting how it works is next to impossible.


by Steve Stark I


n attempting to come up with a graphic representation of how acquisition works, Army AL&T reached out to our contributors across the acquisition enterprise and asked how their organiza- tions fit with other organizations. What we found was far more


complex than we ever expected.


As an example, one program executive office (PEO), Command, Control and Communications – Tactical, which leads the Army’s network priority, reported that the organization touches nearly 20 others within the enterprise, with 35 programs. Compare that relatively small number with the Joint PEO for Armaments and Ammunition’s more than 417 programs, which touch nearly every major organiza- tion within the enterprise, or PEO Soldier’s 383, which easily touch more than a dozen others. Still, the numbers tell only a small part of the story.


One of the things we learned in this undertaking is that depicting acquisition is a numbers game, but different kinds of numbers tell different stories. How it all fits together depends on how you look at it. With the following graphic, we’re only scratching the surface. (Tere are figures in this issue that are nearly as complex as our graphic— see “International Innovation,” Pages 57 and 58—that only seek to describe one facet of acquisition.)


In our graphic, there are dozens of programs and offices listed, and while they’re the core of acquisition, they’re hardly all of it. Overall,


24 Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2020


there are seven major commands and 42 subcommands within the acquisition enterprise, using numbers from the U.S. Army Acquisi- tion Support Center showing where acquisition workforce members work. How you count makes a difference. Most of those commands are not in the graphic.


HOW BIG IS IT? Inside the acquisition workforce, it can be hard to visualize just how big that workforce is. Te scale is mind-boggling. Tose who read this magazine may know that Army AL&T often cites the size of the workforce as approximately 40,000. Tat’s true, but what that means is indicative of just how confusing numbers can get.


Te phrase “approximately 40,000” doesn’t mean that only about that number of people work on Army acquisition. Tat 40,000 includes only federally employed military and civilians whose jobs fall under the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA). Tere are other federal jobs that don’t get DAWIA oversight, but they’re much harder to count.


Of course, people whose jobs are governed by DAWIA are not the only ones who work in acquisition. Te PEO for Intelligence, Electronic Warfare and Sensors, we learned, has 399 federally employed work- ers, of whom 75 are military (a comparatively high number). But in total, it has about 1,900 employees when you add in the contractors who help do the work. Similarly, the PEO for Simulation, Training


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