Exactly the Wrong Idea

JCS Chairman Ray Odierno says that the problem with US defense procurement is that the Uniformed military has insufficient authority, and the civilians have too much authority:

The U.S. Army’s top officer said service chiefs rather than civilians should play a bigger role in deciding what kinds of weapons the military buys.

Army Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno this week called on lawmakers to consider the move while debating ways to reform the Defense Department’s acquisition process.

“There’s a message that gets sent throughout the acquisition force that they don’t work for the uniformed military, they work for the civilians,” he said on Wednesday during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “That’s a dangerous message because I think our experience in support of the process is very important.”

He added, “We should play a bigger role in approving where we’re going, milestones, how the requirements meet with what’s being done by the acquisition. I think an oversight by the military would be more important and could add some potential positive energy towards building better acquisition programs.”

While the service’s top civilian, Army Secretary John McHugh, offered mild support for the idea, saying it “makes some sense,” it’s unclear whether lawmakers would back the proposal. The Army, arguably more than any other service, has a long and troubled history of procurement efforts gone awry.

A government report released in 2011 concluded that since 1996, the Army spent more than $1 billion annually on programs that were ultimately canceled — and that since 2004, the figure climbed to between $3.3 billion and $3.8 billion a year.

While the Army has since implemented a slew of the report’s recommendations, it continues to spend billions of dollars on systems that never enter production. In recent years, for example, the service canceled the Ground Combat Vehicle, or GCV, designed to replace a portion of the fleet of Bradley fighting vehicles, and the Armed Aerial Scout, meant to replace the OH-58 Kiowa helicopter.

The GCV, or more accurately, the FCS, a family of manned and unmanned vehicles, was arguably the most expensive clusterf%$# yet canceled by the military.

The biggest problem was the uniformed military.

A new military program manager would rotate in every 3 years or so, the priorities were changed, and the program suffered more delays and cost growth.

What's more, as a matter of policy, the army, the lead service on the program, had (and perhaps has) a policy of not stating what they want.  They will only say when they don't like something.

So we had interminable meetings about dominated about questions from senior army officers talking about how how disappointed they were that the the colors of models produced by various divisions of BAE and GD did not match up.  (I am not kidding here)

If anything, the evidence is that the uniformed military needs to be further removed from the procurement process.