UNDERSTANDING ARMY ACQUISITION
and Instrumentation has 459 federal employees, of whom 29 are military, but, overall, has nearly 1,000 employees, including contractors. In addition, it has employees in 66 countries work- ing on foreign military sales. So, while the size of the acquisition workforce is about 40,000, it’s also two or three times that size.
WHY UNDERSTAND? Because acquisition is so complex, it’s fair to ask the question: Why bother? For those who work in acquisition, there are proba- bly three salient reasons. First, because we are spending taxpayer money, we have a duty to do so. Second, by understanding how the parts of acquisition fit together, we are more likely to be able to help all of the parts work together better—the parts of the system itself, but also the parts of the materiel systems. Complex- ity makes acquisition so easy to misunderstand that it’s easy to either make mistakes or fail to take reasonable risks. Finally, and somewhat circularly, understanding acquisition better helps us understand acquisition better.
THE NUTS AND BOLTS On paper, traditional acquisition appears to be linear. Or it can be made to look linear. It begins with a need and ends with the divesting of the thing that used to be needed. However, it is no more linear than a coastline, nor is it as simple as the graphic that follows would make it appear. It’s virtually impossible to render how it works in its entirety in two dimensions. Tat doesn’t mean it can’t be understood. Understanding acquisition isn’t about getting every last thing. And sometimes it means oversimplifying.
Te nuts and bolts of materiel acquisition in the Army are thus: Te field expresses a need for a capability. Tat need gets devel- oped into requirements by the appropriate cross-functional team within the U.S. Army Futures Command (AFC). AFC works to turn the concept into a technology demonstration and perhaps a prototype. Te U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) has a hand in all of this because it’s responsible for doctrine and training. Everything that’s acquired has to fit within the Army’s conceptual framework of doctrine, organiza- tion, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities (DOTMLPF), and TRADOC owns DOTMLPF. (Tat TRADOC layer isn’t the only level that’s not in plain sight. More on that in a bit.)
Tat concept from AFC then gets handed off to a PEO within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisi- tion, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT)) for development and execution. Once the capability is built, tested and fielded, it’s handed off to the U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC), more
or less, and AMC assumes responsibility for sustainment and logistics and, eventually, divestiture and perhaps demilitarization.
However, those exchanges are much more complex than any graphic can show, and differ from program to program. What appear to be dividing lines between the organizations’ responsi- bilities aren’t really dividing lines at all, because the organizations and their functions within the acquisition enterprise are so closely intertwined. (Bromides like “acquisition is a team sport” don’t just appear out of thin air.) And the system is sometimes circu- lar, too, as with older programs that are being upgraded and sustained indefinitely.
CONCLUSION As might be clear from the foregoing, the three major organiza- tions that make up the enterprise are AFC, ASA(ALT) and AMC. Other major commands that are involved in the process are the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Army Forces Command and many others. We didn’t put them in, for the sake of simplicity.
Acquisition has layers of complexity that are also not depicted. Looked at one way, the acquisition career fields that DAWIA mandates offer a window into those layers. Contracting, program management, engineering, business financial management, life cycle logistics, and test and evaluation are just a few of the layers, each with different imperatives and different work.
So big is Army acquisition that it begins to resemble an infinite coast in the coastline paradox. Tat paradox has it that the closer you try to measure a coastline, the longer it gets. A coastline is an obviously finite thing, but just how finite depends on how you look at it. Still, it’s not hard to find the beach.
Tat’s a lot like Army acquisition—the closer you try to look at it, the harder it gets to understand. But everyone knows where the beach is. And, if it were easy to understand, we wouldn’t need Defense Acquisition University.
STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more than two decades of editing and writing about the military, science and technology, he is, as Stephen Stark, the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer health-oriented books and an award-winning novelist.
https://asc.ar my.mil
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