Officials: DOD acquisition system weak

Adm. Dennis Blair's speech

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

The existing process is slow and overly bureaucratic, stifles creativity and is in desperate need of an overhaul, he said.

"I believe that our acquisition system is fundamentally broken, especially in the area of information technology," Blair said during a speech at the West 2002 conference in San Diego. "If we don't change it, it will break us."

Others agree change is needed. "We have to sharply decrease our capability cycle time," retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, director of DOD's Office of Force Transformation, said at the conference.

Reforming the way the armed forces buy systems is critical to the success of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's efforts to transform DOD, Blair argued.

Cebrowski said that project development needs to follow an ongoing process of experimentation, prototyping and deployment. By quickly rolling out systems, users will take more ownership of those systems and help develop improvements, he said.

Some good systems have suffered because of problems with the acquisition process. One system was designed to create a secure, wireless wide-area network over a joint battlefield covering 20,000 square miles. But that system has floundered as development slowed and key personnel left.

"Had we made the progress...we would have had the technology, organization and procedures to use an early version of the system in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan," Blair said.