| 摘要 | By Jonathan Messinger
On Tuesday, we ran the first installment of our interview with PSF contributor William Greenwalt, looking at the new Better Buying Power 3.0 plan to reform defense acquisition. Greenwalt is a former deputy undersecretary of defense and Congressional staffer, and was recently named a senior advisor for TechAmerica. In part two, we dive a little deeper into Better Buying Power’s bullet points.
On DoD laboratories
WG: We have a government arsenal system for R&D that runs $30 billion a year. In other countries, they figured out they can’t afford that. So the question for us is, is it as efficient as the private sector model? It’s a very interesting discussion they’re going to have, and it’s good they’ve identified it as an issue. The R&D way of doing business, is that the future for government or not? What kind of cloning of civil R&D can be done? Civil R&D spends a lot more than $30 billion, but most if it is not focused on defense’s problems, so how do you leverage that?
JM: In general, these seemed to be geared toward involving industry more.
WG: I think there’s a realization in leadership’s mind that some of these solutions are out there in industry. The problem is whether you’ve created such barriers, such disincentives to industry’s participation, that you can’t get what you need. Huge hurdles have put in place to get that level of cooperation, and get that participation, going back several administrations. They need to break that knot.
JM: Do they need legislation to make that happen?
WG: Well, it would start with looking at the guidelines, a lot of this is interpretation by executive branch of congressional statute. What is the real legislative intent? The executive branch has gone way too far in implementing what could be reasonably flexible standards in the law. They got themselves in a box they can’t get out of, but there’s a lot they can do by going back and asking questions, looking at previous interpretations. That requires taking some risks, and that’s tough in this risk-averse environment.
JM: What would you say is the most important piece of this?
WG: Incentivizing innovation. The whole idea of these various programs is experimentation, but is the end result going to be operational? I’m glad there’s an emphasis in commercial modular technology. If you have open modular systems, you can have multiple competitors who all have the same standards to plug into.
If you look at the SBIR grant, there have been a lot of cool science projects, but nothing ever really transitions out of that. It’s all positive that they’re looking to improve these, but the issue is communication with industry. That’s not the way they do business, they issue these edicts from on high that tumble through the transom to industry.
They’re afraid they’re going to give some advantage if they talk to [vendors]. Therefore industry responds to some stupid requirements, then the Department picks something based on some stupid requirements, and then they negotiate what they really want to do.
And best value is key. The emphasis on low cost—LPTAs—has been driving defense down to the bottom.
JM: What about the Navy’s Superior Supplier Program?
WG: Past performance is important. They should be looking at past performance, this is one mechanism to do that. How effective the Navy program does that, the jury is still out on that. But it’s a movement in the right direction: How do we give them credit for doing a good job in the next levels of competition? That one’s a work in progress, there might be other reforms, but the idea is really sound.
On improving competition
WG: I like the idea of going out into global markets. Our allies have really great ideas that could apply to DoD. An additional level of this, though, is accessing the commercial marketplace that is global. It entails some risk, but it’s important to do. I thought it was interesting when Secretary Kendall made the comment that DoD is essentially a low-volume specialty buyer. They’ve got to come to grips with only so much competition they can hold. They need competition of ideas, because there’s only so much they’re going to produce.
JM: When we’ve talked in the past, you’ve mentioned that a lot of reforms are just reinventing the wheel, in terms of what reforms have come in the past. Do you think that’s the case now?
WG: I’m hopeful that we are reinventing the wheel in this particular case. There are huge amounts of lessons learned from past times when we’ve done this right. In the ’50s, ’70s, ’90s, we had acquisition reforms designed to get innovation. When we kind of reinvented the wheel in the last five years, it’s been in reaction to perceived acquisition scandals, tightening up a process-oriented mentality, or an industry-bashing mentality. I’m hoping the cycle is shifting. Two factors are responsible for that shift: One is the budget, we simply can’t afford a bureaucratic system. The second is we’re reaching a technology gap that we need to address. The cycles have been pretty constant, tightening up, loosening up, commercial-oriented, government-unique oriented. We may be at that inflection point of going back to commercial-oriented, where we open up to industry, where innovation matters more than process. But the jury is still out, this is just a draft Powerpoint slide with a lot of good ideas, but they’re still constrained by system, and other mechanisms that started in BBP 1.0 that can hold innovations back. I hope I’m reading this right that we’re seeing more of a shift into putting innovation first. |
