During a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing today, witnesses underscored urgent concerns regarding the Department of Defense’s (DoD) inefficient spending practices, emphasizing a critical need for reform.
At the top of their list of concerns is the DoD’s acquisition practices, which witnesses argued need major upgrades to meet the needs of the digital era.
Moshe Schwartz, senior fellow of acquisition policy at the National Defense Industrial Association, told members of the National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee that one of the major setbacks in DoD’s acquisition system is that “there are just too many acquisition rules, and the rules are overly complicated.”
“Streamlining the procurement process and making it easier to work with DoD is critical. When acquisition processes that are not overburdened by regulation have been used … the results have generally been positive,” Schwartz said.
However, he emphasized that streamlining rules and processes does not mean repealing necessary oversight. In fact, if done correctly, streamlining could increase accountability by clarifying lines of authority, shortening timelines, and improving outcomes without undermining oversight.
“We should take a holistic approach to oversight, ensuring that regulations aimed at solving specific problems don’t have unintended consequences to the overall acquisition system that cause more harm than good,” he said.
Unlike Schwartz, Mackenzie Eaglen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, had a different take on why DoD’s acquisition system has led to wasteful spending.
The system, she explained, is outdated and in desperate need of a digital age makeover.
Eaglen told lawmakers that the DoD’s current acquisition system is a “Soviet-style purchasing system mostly unfit for the digital age.”
“The state of the industrial base is the direct result of U.S. government policies after the Cold War ended. The Pentagon actively encouraged consolidation and lean production in the 1990s and placed lowest cost above other purchasing priorities,” Eaglen said.
“There have been plenty of programs in the past that have run over budget or delivered too late. However, high prices for advanced military equipment are not solely the result of widespread waste, fraud, and abuse, but often inefficient program management and an inability to implement best practices,” she said.
Similarly, Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director for the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, told lawmakers that the department’s acquisition system needs an update.
Today, he said program officials view acquisition management as an exercise in balancing between three factors often characterized as an “Iron Triangle”: program cost, development or production schedule, and system performance.
In theory, according to Clark, DoD officials can adjust the parameters associated with each factor to achieve program goals.
“DoD should adopt a new ‘Iron Triangle’ better suited to an era in which rapid technological change and accelerating battlefield innovations preclude accurate prediction of future needs and allow for tactics and systems to evolve in concert,” he said.
This new approach, he told lawmakers must “focus more on the operational problems of the near-term” instead of the projected capability gaps of the next decade.
