SASC gets an old acquisition hand

William Greenwalt, a former deputy undersecretary of Defense, has returned to his previous position as a staff member focusing on acquisition at the Senate Armed Services Committee. His move comes after an 18-month stint as a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute focusing on a range of defense issues.

Greenwalt brings deep federal acquisition policy experience to the committee at a time when Congress is considering ways of simplifying a defense acquisition system that both practitioners and observers say is overly complex.

From 2006 to 2009, Greenwalt was deputy undersecretary of Defense for industrial policy, serving as the top adviser to successive undersecretaries for acquisition, technology and logistics Kenneth Krieg and John J. Young Jr.

Greenwalt’s 20-year career influencing defense policy has included top acquisition posts at Lockheed Martin Corp. and the Aerospace Industries Association. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Greenwalt spent more than a decade on Capitol Hill as an adviser to the Senate Governmental Affairs and Armed Services committees. During this time he helped write the Clinger-Cohen Act, an influential IT procurement law.

In an email to colleagues in the federal IT and acquisition communities, Greenwalt noted some of his side projects while at AEI included a review of NASA's security with the National Academy of Public Administration, work on drone development, and a study of "non-traditional contractors" with the University of Maryland.

From his post at AEI, Greenwalt has compared the defense acquisition to "an 18th century wooden warship that has been out to sea for too long," and called for a multiyear effort to overhaul it.