DOD acquisition system 'broken'

Transition of the armed services will be virtually impossible without a wholesale reform of the Defense Department's acquisition process, said Adm. Dennis Blair, commander in chief of the Navy's U.S. Pacific Command.

"In the last 12 months, I have become even more convinced that our current approach to transforming our armed forces must be changed, particularly the way we acquire systems. If we don't change it, it will break us," Blair said Jan. 15 at the West 2002 conference in San Diego.

"I believe that our acquisition system is fundamentally broken, especially in the area of information technology," he said.

Blair said he made his comments acknowledging that the armed forces are doing well, but he said that they have not done well enough and that there have been costs in missed opportunities.

The current acquisition system does not move quickly enough, fails to put engineers together with operators to address real-world problems or deal with emerging threats and fails to address evolving requirements, the admiral said.

The process is hamstrung by a bureaucracy that does not reward — or even make allowances for — innovation or modifications, he said.

"The bigger and more standardized the program, the better from the perspective of the program manager," he said.

Instead, Blair said that programs should be developed incrementally, testing projects in real-world situations.

DOD must institutionalize the links between joint operations and service acquisition centers, he said. Those can be improved dramatically by holding more exercises that require the military services to work together.

The department has created a so-called Rapid Improvement Team that is spearheading an effort to get IT projects into the hands of warfighters more rapidly — even within 18 months. DOD officials last month approved several pilot programs that will be used to test the concepts developed by RIT.