Here is Steve Grundman discussing Ash Carter’s Better Buying Power rollout:
“… the term incentives is this campaign’s refrain, appearing 13 times in the document (bested only by competition, which is invoked no less than 50 times!). At the roll-out, Carter’s terse response to a reporter’s suggestion that the initiative “would seem to require a cultural change within the Department of Defense” was a telling moment. “I don’t do cultural change,” replied Carter. “This is directing specific actions . . . and the cause-and-effect is pretty specific . . . and the metrics by which we measure the effects are spelled out in the document. So culture’s too hard for me. Behavior, that’s what we’re after.”
I think that says we can take Acquisition Reform Day off our calendars.
I think entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz would disagree in his book, What you do is who you are. An organization’s behavior is its culture. Anything else is just words that people say that hold no meaning. Of course, today’s defense leaders (especially uniformed) talk constantly about the need for culture change.
Here’s more on how this all relates to TSPR:
About a decade ago, at roughly the mid-point of the industry restructuring set in motion at Bill Perry’s “last supper,” the department adopted a collection of acquisition policies and practices under the rubric Total Systems Performance Responsibility or TSPR (and pronounced “tis’-per”). The customer preferences reflected in TSPR favored the increased outsourcing of certain functions in the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of acquisition programs which during the Cold War had been shared between government and industry. At the upstream end of that cycle, the acquisition workforce at military departments’ laboratories and engineering centers shrank dramatically, both in size and significance, ceding to industry the critical design and system engineering and integration functions at the center of acquisition programs. At the apex of this trend line emerged the concept of the so-called Lead Systems Integrator, which subsumed not only the systems engineering function but even large parts of the concept development function, and not only for discrete weapons but entire warfighting mission areas like missile defense (see Ground-Based Midcourse Defense) and ground combat (see Future Combat Systems).
… Setting down Better Buying Power, one can’t help concluding those preferences are sharply changed. Where before the customer looked to industry to lead its upstream science, engineering, and program management, the Guidance reiterates that “the [government] acquisition workforce increases planned last year should proceed . . . focused on specific skill sets near to the point of execution.”
We need to give a lot of credit to Frank Kendall, who took Ash’s nascent thoughts, and turned them into a reality. Frankly (no pun intended), Frank started to make people pay attention and think about how we can really fix the acquisition process. That his predecessors did not continue the process may be unfortunate.
TSPR was an unmitigated disaster. Not all of the blame for that falls on industry — a key part of the problem was DoD’s inability to define (and stick to) concrete requirements that would let the LSI make meaningful trades among cost, performance, reliability, sustainability, etc. (Requiring violation of the laws of physics, as with FCS and JTRS, didn’t help.)
Unfortunately, acquisition reform is not symmetric. It is much easier to shed government capability (e.g. in engineering) than it is to get that capability back into the government. Once you’ve sold the farm and fired the farmers, you’re going to have to depend on others for your food.