{"id":183072,"date":"2015-03-22T19:25:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-23T00:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/03\/22\/exactly-the-wrong-idea\/"},"modified":"2015-03-22T19:25:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-23T00:25:00","slug":"exactly-the-wrong-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/03\/22\/exactly-the-wrong-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Exactly the Wrong Idea"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The U.S. Army\u2019s top officer said service chiefs rather than civilians should play a bigger role in deciding what kinds of weapons the military buys.<\/span>

<\/span>Army Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno this week called on lawmakers to consider the move while debating ways to reform the Defense Department\u2019s acquisition process.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cThere\u2019s a message that gets sent throughout the acquisition force that they don\u2019t work for the uniformed military, they work for the civilians,\u201d he said on Wednesday during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. \u201cThat\u2019s a dangerous message because I think our experience in support of the process is very important.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>He added, \u201cWe should play a bigger role in approving where we\u2019re going, milestones, how the requirements meet with what\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>While the service\u2019s top civilian, Army Secretary John McHugh, offered mild support for the idea, saying it \u201cmakes some sense,\u201d it\u2019s 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.<\/span>

<\/span>A government report released in 2011 concluded that since 1996, the Army spent more than $1 billion annually on programs that were ultimately canceled \u2014 and that since 2004, the figure climbed to between $3.3 billion and $3.8 billion a year.<\/span>

<\/span>While the Army has since implemented a slew of the report\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem was the uniformed military.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/b> kidding here)<\/p>\n

If anything, the evidence is that the uniformed military needs to be further removed from the procurement process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1008,1006,982],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-defense-procurement","category-military","category-stupid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183072"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}