Bernie Skoch: As anyone whose spent time in the five sided house of pleasure can tell you, there’s a programming process and there’s a budgeting process. Do you have any views on how those processes could be sped up to match what we’re trying to do in acquisition.
Will Roper: I think the Air Force has already taken a big step. We can’t do 804 [rapid acquisition] programs without our budgeters and programmers understanding that they have an option. They can fund more if that’s needed, or they can fund fewer things and push down the accelerator. Whether something needs to go fast doesn’t need to be an acquisition choice; we should go as fast as we can with the money we have, but it should be the commander that decides ‘I need this program to go at light speed, this one can deliver slower than that.’
So presenting options is what we need to do. It takes a team to go fast. When we do an acquisition review, a lot of the people around the table don’t work for me. We have finance people, lawyers, test, operators. Everyone at that table has to agree that we have to move.
That was from Will Roper’s talk at the Air Force Association in March 2019. I must admit that I’m a huge fan when it comes to Roper, and pretty much the entire talk he gave was right on point. However, I didn’t quite understand the answer provided above on how the budget process can be sped up.
It seemed like there is some limiting factor in terms of bureaucratic work. Roper made it sound like you could accelerate a couple high-valued programs, or you can do a wide-range of programs at the regular pace. I’m not sure if I interpreted that correctly, but it seems like the program/budget folks simply have a lot of steps to go through which often takes years, and focusing attention on one program pulls attention away from other programs. So there is a bottleneck in program evaluation due to centralization.
I think that the reason so many different officials are at the acquisition review table, all reporting to different bosses, is because authorization of a program is often a funding commitment over 5-plus years, and commitment to procurement and operations.
Roper often speaks of the need to prototype and develop test articles, and expect that not all will be fielded but that such an outcome is OK because of the learning process. He says that we cannot predict technologies and environments a decade out. That kind of incremental decision making — going “fast” — is completely at odds with the very philosophy of the PPBE budget process.
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