| 摘要 | By Jonathan Messinger
With Friday’s “interim release” of the Department of Defense’s next phase of acquisition reform, Better Buying Power 3.0, we turn to PSF contributor William Greenwalt for some initial thoughts. Of course, “PSF contributor” is way down the list of accomplishments on Bill’s résumé. He’s a former deputy undersecretary of defense and Congressional staffer, and was recently named a senior advisor for TechAmerica. This is part one of the interview, a sort of high-level look at the new roll-out. We’ll dive a little deeper tomorrow.
What jumps out to you right away?
I think in one sense it’s a positive development, just the fact that it looks like finally the Department of Defense has started to come to grips with its impending technology gap, which was, in one sense, put in place by past acquisition efforts. Because BBP 3.0 is focused on technology innovation, I’m actually somewhat more positive on this particular effort than I was on others — although, the implementation of it and changing the culture are going to be even harder than in the past.
Why is it harder now?
The Pentagon has just gone through five years of transforming the acquisition workforce and its business processes into a risk-averse compliance-based environment, and now they’ve woken up to find that technologically we’re at risk. Secretary Hagel in a recent speech said it’s time for a third offset strategy, They recognize that technologically we’re at risk, and we need to do something game-changing and revolutionary. It is going to be awfully hard to do that with the current acquisition system as it has evolved over the last five years.
Past acquisition reform efforts had been geared toward existing programs, not looking at new technology. They were more about putting programs in boxes, reducing costs, squeezing contractors on margins. They reflected a status quo power that wasn’t going anywhere. BBP 3.0 a positive effort, but it’s going to be hard to implement it, because they’ve spent so much time creating a status quo power acquisition system. Now the system needs to be a revolutionary.
Do you think this can bring real change?
Well, there’s no meat on the bones yet. With some of the most important initiatives—to remove barriers to commercial technology utilization for example —there’s a lot you can do there, but there’s nothing there there, yet. We have a compliance oversight system driving commercial producers out of market right now, as we speak. DOD is so obsessed with commercial spare parts, worried about getting the best prices on commercial spare parts, that they are impacted the rest of the acquisition system in this single minded quest. But the question should be how do we get brand new commercial products, get new non-traditional companies working on things for the government, and obtain new cutting edge technology. It baffles my mind as to what has been a priority in acquisition in the last five years.
The devil is in the details, what kind of experimentation we see—are we going to get real operational prototypes, or just science experiments.
On incentivizing productivity and innovation
In the past, profitability has been aligned with production. We need to align profitability with innovation. If I recall, Secretary Kendall (in his talk at CSIS), said that R&D pays about 6%, and production 12%. If we want to get companies to build revolutionary things, we need R&D profits to be close to what you make in production.
Using PBLs would be nice, but there’s so much concern over profit margins it may not be going anywhere. Contracting and oversight folks are so hung up on reducing margins on commercially derived spare parts, they miss the bigger picture. If you look at the first two offset strategies, they required bringing together civil and military industrial bases to solve game-changing problems. The only way for that to happen again is if we have the same type of industrial strategy. It requires throwing off some of the constraints put on the system by bean counters of the world, but I just don’t know if department can do this in this particular environment. |
