DoD tries to institutionalize gains on rapid acquisition, but much depends on workforce

Readers of Robert Gates’ biography will remember that one of the former Defense secretary’s biggest disappointments was how much effort and political capital he had to personally expend to get the DoD acquisition system to deliver results to the field when there was no clear constituency for a given program within the bureaucracy of the military services.

The mine-resistant, ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle program is now the main poster child for the “if there’s a will, there’s a way” approach to rapid acquisition. But Andrew Hunter, the director of DoD’s rapid acquisition cell says senior leaders have come to realize that they should be able to acquire urgent items quickly without the secretary of Defense having to effectively become the program manager.

Hunter, speaking to reporters in a rare media engagement before he leaves the Pentagon for a new job at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued that the department has done a fairly respectable job of making rapid acquisition part of DoD’s DNA.

As evidence, Hunter pointed to DoD’s project to destroy Syria’s chemical weapons. Within the span of a few months, it brought together mature technologies from the Army and Navy, cobbled them together aboard a civilian-crewed ship operated by the Military Sealift Command, and neutralized the chemicals in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea without much trouble.

And as part of the Pentagon’s main acquisition guidebook, DoD Instruction 5000.02, defense acquisition officials added a new enclosure (Enclosure 13 — for those interested in the details) that attempts to reassure program managers who need something right away that the system really can accommodate their needs.

“We’ve always had a gap: people always tell us, ‘Yes, we’re always hearing that you’re doing rapid acquisition and that you can do it, but where do we go to see how it’s done and which rules you we have to follow?’ It’s probably not perfect, but [the enclosure] does that, and it largely reflects how we’ve done this over the past several years.”

When challenged about the notion that a new annex to a longstanding document could alter the culture of DoD’s massive acquisition bureaucracy, Hunter was still optimistic.

“It can’t lock in the progress we’ve achieved, but I think it lets the workforce know it’s OK to keep doing this, and that things like the MRAP weren’t just a one-time experiment,” he said. “If you go back to 2003, there were a lot of questions in the acquisition community. People said, ‘Can we really deliver things inside a year?’ And they said the budget process and the requirements process just can’t do it. I think a lot of this is about remembering that we can achieve it. The workforce knows this can be done now. The message of the enclosure is that not only was it OK then, it’s OK now, and it’s expected. This is how our system is going to behave from now on for things that are urgent operational needs.”

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