A ten-year review of the vision for transforming the defense acquisition system

Defense AR Journal, Jan-April, 2004 by Edward W. Rogers, Robert P. Birmingham

"With this report, then, we begin a decade-long process of reinvention." "We hope it will transform the hatis, culture, and performance of all federal organizations."

(Former Vice President Al Gore, 1993)

This paper traces the vision for reform of the Department of Defense Acquisition System from 1993 through 2003. Using a qualitative document review process, a conceptual picture of overarching themes is presented. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the change roadmap to assist building empirical research models of the effectiveness of the various initiatives, programs restructurings, and policy mandates that have all contributed to the current climate for change within the DoD and the acquisition community.

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The year 2003 marks the end of a decade of concerted effort at transforming the way the government does business. A major focus of that effort has been the transformation of the way the Department of Defense (DoD) acquires new equipment through the Defense Acquisition System. In fact, the beginnings of this journal were steeped in acquisition reform. The topic has been an on-going subject with six or more articles per year dealing with acquisition reform efforts. The inaugural issue in 1994 opened with a piece by then Deputy Under Secretary for Defense (DUSD) Colleen Preston outlining the new initiatives for acquisition reform (Preston, 1994). The pages of the Acquisition Review Quarterly have proven to be a forum for a fertile debate on the merits, means, and misgivings of acquisition reform. This article looks back over the last ten years and traces the path of the vision for that change.

In 1993, the National Performance Review (NPR), released under then Vice President Gore, laid out a vision for change that many have considered the landmark for a new decade of effort to change the way the government does business. This paper attempts to take a conceptual view of what evolved from that NPR mandate into the particular vision for changing the Defense Acquisition System within the DoD (Gore, 1993). What makes this a good time for reflection is the fact that near the end of 2002, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz issued a memorandum canceling the DoD 5000 series of acquisition policy documents (Wolfowitz, 2002).

Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz judged the latest documents to be "not conducive to an acquisition environment that fosters flexibility, efficiency, creativity, and innovation." This raises the question of what exactly happened to the vision for acquisition reform during the past decade. To answer this question the authors of this paper decided to bring together their respective academic knowledge of organizational change and the practical experience of program management to examine a decade of reform effort.

METHODOLOGY

We conducted a broad review of literature on reform of the DoD to identify key documents that could be considered landmarks or mandates for the acquisition transformation process. We searched government documents available on-line as well as those suggested by talking with people working in the acquisition corps. We also reviewed published articles in the Acquisition Review Quarterly since its inaugural issue in 1994. From a total of several hundred documents collected and examined, we selected seven as dealing broadly with a vision for changing the acquisition system.

In addition to the document search, interviews were conducted with a number of individuals in the Pentagon, the acquisition community, program managers, and industry leaders. The purpose of these interviews was not to collect a sample of data but to clarify the understanding of the documents and the intent of the some of the terms, titles, and statements to avoid misinterpreting the written records. We also used the interviews to confirm that we had selected what people involved in defense acquisition generally consider the landmark documents that have set the direction of change during the decade. Since the overall purpose of the report was very broad we agreed to a complete non-attribution arrangement with all the people interviewed.

We distilled the contents of the seven documents into tables highlighting their key elements for ease of comparison. From the summarized tables and interviews, we traced the evolution of the different aspects of the overall vision for change including the drivers (perceived problems), and the description of the desired end state. From our analysis of key milestone documents we developed a conceptual picture of how the transformation vision has evolved over the decade. Finally, we propose several observations that should be addressed with empirical methods to help answer important policy questions regarding acquisition reform. We hope this review effort will help spawn research and debate for charting the way towards a new and better acquisition system for the DoD.

THE NATIONAL PERFORMANCE REVIEW--1993

The decade beginning in 1993 certainly was not isolated from the previous decades and prior attempts at reforming the DoD. David Packard had a large influence on the reform movement starting with the Packard Initiatives in 1969 through the Packard Commission and its report, "The Quest for Excellence" delivered in 1986. This era closed with Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney's "Defense Management: A Report to the President" in 1989. These efforts attempted to deal with ballooning costs, duplicative programs across services, and the authority lines for determining acquisition priorities, budgets, and program evaluations but often also added layers of reporting and bureaucracy. This led Thomas McNaugher to lament at the end of the 1980s that the defense acquisition system may actually be worse for the reform efforts of that decade (McNaugher, 1990).