First, the overhead costs of manning the acquisition room are some place between 10 and 50 times what it would cost to proceed on a deliberate, rational basis to initiate acquisitions and establish minimum procedures for systems acquisition in order to keep systems safe and well.
If you want to calculate the costs of the way we do business, and this is a conservative estimate, we spend an amount equal to 50 percent of the total dollars involved. So, if the total dollars involved, are a trillion dollars, we are spending $500 billion on trying to achieve various forms of accountability, and we do not get very much for that expenditure.
The final characteristic is that the cumulative effect of all these efforts to control suppliers runs a great danger of converting that portion of the private sector, which is serving Government system needs to a quasi-nationalized segment of our economy. I think that is a terrible price to pay for perpetuating our misunderstanding about the acquisition process, and how we ought to control it.
That was NPS professor Robert Judson in 1975 hearing, “Major Systems Acquisition (Part 2).” Comptroller General Elmer Staats gave a similar figure around that time as well.
My reaction is that the real problem isn’t that 50% of defense funds go towards documentation. It is that the process of documenting a program, and then actually expecting officials to execute on that plan, leads to bad technical decisions. The weapons programs themselves are damaged by the documentation, as is industry which becomes indistinguishable from state-owned firms.
It would probably be better if 50% of acquisition funds were simply canceled. Allow technical experts to make choices without regard to unvalidated opinions from every corner of the Pentagon. Another way about it is to heed Rickover’s idea that one-third of the people should be allowed to work on programs, and the remaining two-thirds would simply write long-form letters to each other rather than meddle with decision-making.
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