Army acquisition chief wants streamlined testing

Army acquisition chief Heidi Shyu called for a streamlined testing process for military programs that would harness the testing abilities of both industry and the government.

The military needs to speed up its testing to deliver weapons and other products to its troops faster and more efficiently, Shyu said during an Oct. 13 panel at an Association of the United States Army event in Washington.

Shyu said the government should consider ways to watch industry development tests so that it does less of its own duplicative testing.

“Industry spends all [this] time and effort doing the development testing. They hand it over to the government, who repeats the same thing and extends the time and costs additional money, and then you go to operational tests.” Shyu said. “There’s layers and layers of testing that’s taking stuff forever to deliver to the hands of our soldiers.”

Dana Mehnert, senior vice president at the Harris Corporation, said often times industry will test beyond what the government will do. Mehnert said there should be a comprehensive, singular set of test requirements defined between industry and government.

Pierre Chao, a founding partner at Renaissance Strategic Advisors, added that government should reconsider its acceptance of program failure when testing programs.

Chao said that the government does not accept failure in the correct times and points of a testing cycle, leading to cost overruns and programs that turn into quagmires.

“We have a habit of setting the bar so high that way when things get through it we are reluctant to kill it. Silicon Valley does it very differently; they have the bar very low, have a wide aperture, but have a very quick kill mechanism,” Chao said. “The acceptance of failure is partly a leadership issue of protecting the [program executive officer], [program manager] or company that’s failing, but getting somewhere.”

Program costs, private sector best practices

Congress already has taken notice of testing overruns and put a provision specifically for the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) in its 2016 Defense authorization bill.

The bill recommends DOT&E take into account any unnecessary increases in program costs or schedule delays when conducting his oversight duties.

It also calls for DOT&E to consider private sector best practices with respect to oversight implementation when conducting tests.

DoD has openly opposed the provision. DOT&E director J. Michael Gilmore reiterated the point in an Oct. 1 statement provided to Federal News Radio by a Pentagon spokesman.

“Several studies, including the June 2015 Government Accountability Office study on DOT&E directed by the Joint Explanatory Statement to Accompany the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2015, have shown that such testing does not cause programmatic delays and cost overrun,” Gilmore said in the statement. “The value of such testing is abundantly clear when considering the alternative: discovering these problems for the first time in combat, when it is too late to correct them. DOT&E has always recognized its responsibility to assure realistic testing is conducted while not causing unnecessary disruption to programs and will continue to do so, consistent with the 2016 NDAA.”

It remains to be determined if the recommendations will even make it into law, considering President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the 2016 authorization bill.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter reemphasized in an Oct. 14 speech that there were a number of provisions in the bill the President was unhappy with and the bill will most likely be vetoed.

Personnel

One of the places where testing experts are trained and work is the Army Research Lab (ARL) in Adelphi, Maryland. Maj. Gen. John Wharton, commanding general of Army Research Development and Engineering Command, said the Army is building a second research lab in Southern California as a means of attracting young, technology-minded personnel.

“Many of the kids that are out there don’t want to move east, they want to stay out west,” Wharton said.

The military increasingly has been worried that it will not be able to compete with the private sector in recruiting a technology-savvy workforce.

ARL West “will be different than just an ARL. It will look for all our other organizations to participate, to do recruiting and to have an open campus-like atmosphere or ecosystem out there,” Wharton said.

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