Air Force’s scheduling initiative will be an uphill climb

The Air Force’s “should schedule” program is going to be an uphill battle, according to the outgoing assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition.

The program, which was announced in September, is aimed at speeding up the Air Force’s acquisition process, especially in the testing and development stage.

However, the government just doesn’t have the same kind of incentives to give companies to shorten schedules as it does to lessen costs, Air Force acquisition chief Dr. William LaPlante told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday.

“Independent cost estimators will say ‘That is a five year program.’ And then it’s just set. Nobody is incentivized to see if we can make it four and a half [years], four [years], LaPlante said.

No one is incentivized because of the “way the Pentagon works,” LaPlante said. Acquisition programs’ costs are traditionally spread out over the Future Years Defense Plan. A hypothetical program may get $5 million in fiscal 2016, $10 million in 2017 and $7 million in 2018. Since both the Defense Department and defense budgeters want certainty in the budget they program all of the expected money for a year.

If the hypothetical program speeds up and ends up finishing in in 2017, it will need $17 million for that year instead of $10 million. That means budgeters will have to go back and take money from another program.

“If I’m going faster and I can prove that I’m going faster, someone has to find more money,” LaPlante said. “They have to move it up and programmers are always trying to balance … they say ‘If you go faster I don’t know where I’d get the money.”

That makes it hard for the Air Force to give profitable incentives to companies that can get a job done faster.

Right now, the Air Force can only offer priority of a contract to a company that can provide faster schedules.

On the other hand, the Air Force’s “should cost” program can incentivize industry to lower costs with monetary rewards.

Savings are then pumped back into the program and portfolio.

Should cost was part of the first version of Better Buying Power and has cut program costs by $2 billion throughout the last several years.

“We now have hundreds more air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons that have become available in today’s fight because we were able to buy them back into our inventory through ‘should cost’ savings out of our weapons portfolio,” Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in October. “In other words, we saved in those accounts and we were able to plow those savings back into buying more.”

LaPlante and Army acquisition chief Heidi Shyu announced they were leaving their positions last week.

LaPlante will be taking a job at the MITRE Corporation after spending three years in charge of Air Force acquisition.

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