The House Armed Services Committee last week kicked off a fresh drive to fix the way the Pentagon buys weapons and services, vowing to “look past Band-Aid fixes and parochial interests” and implement meaningful reforms.
The committee’s chairman, U.S. Representative Buck McKeon, said some successful efforts were already under way, but the U.S. military acquisition system still faced significant challenges including cost overruns and schedule delays, and those would get worse due to mounting pressure on U.S. budgets.
“The Congress, together with the Department of Defense and industry, must be willing to do the hard work to find root causes, look past Band-Aid fixes and parochial interests, and have the courage to implement meaningful, lasting reform,” McKeon said at the start of a hearing on the issue.
McKeon said he had asked Representative Mac Thornberry, a Texas Republican, to lead the long-term effort, aided by Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the committee.
The latest Government Accountability Office report calculates that the Pentagon is slated to spend $1.5 trillion to acquire 85 separate weapons programs in coming years. Those programs are projected to experience $411 billion in cost growth and average scheduled delays of 27 months, the GAO estimates.
Paul Francis, managing director of acquisition and sourcing management for the GAO, told the committee that previous reform efforts had started to slow cost growth, but 39 percent of the weapons programs on the books in fiscal 2012 had experienced cost growth of 25 percent or more.
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