| Spring/Summer
2001 |
Crisis in the Acquisition
Workforce: Some simple solutions
James H. Gill |
(PDF file; size 722KB)
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The military
acquisition system is facing a crisis of significant
proportions, with the imminent loss, through retirement
and attrition, of a substantial portion of its experienced
workforce, which is responsible for the development,
production, and deployment of new weapons. Implications
for vital national security issues, for both the near
and long term, are serious. The potential inability
of the acquisition process to provide quality weapons
in a timely manner and at a reasonable price should
be disturbing to senior leaders within the Department
of Defense (DoD). What can be done about the potential
loss of this acquisition leadership? Here are some creative
approaches, although they will require bucking entrenched
bureaucracies to implement, that could resolve the current
shortfall and prevent future ones. |
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Changing the focus of
business process redesign from activity flows to information
flows: A Defense Acquisition Application
Ned Kock |
(PDF file; size 146KB)
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Current business
process redesign practices, in the defense sector as
well as in business in general, are based on several
assumptions inherited from Taylor’s scientific
management method, including the key assumption that
activity-flow representations should provide the basis
for business process redesign. While this assumption
was probably correct for most organizations in the early
1900s, it is clearly inconsistent with the fact that,
currently, “information” is what most flows
in business processes, even in manufacturing organizations.
The current focus of current business process redesign
approaches should be on information flows rather than
activity flows. (An action research study of a business
process redesign project involving the Department of
Defense and Computer Sciences Corporation supports this
hypothesis.) |
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Network-Centric Warfare
and its Function in the Realm of Interoperability
Joseph M. Ladymon |
(PDF file; size 1,477B)
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Has the Navy
progressed in providing sufficient resources to the
level of complete and full interoperability of “Network-Centric
Warfare” between the United States and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) allies? Network-centric warfare
was first introduced into the Navy in January 1998,
by VADM Arthur Cebrowski, U.S. Navy, and John Garstka,
and comprises two intertwined themes of technology and
policy. This research explores the technology aspect
as currently centered on Information Technology for
the 21 st Century (IT-21), identifies both pitfalls
and advantages associated with IT-21 and interoperability
amongst NATO allies, and shows that the Navy has a long
road to travel toward reaching full interoperability
with the Network-centric warfare concept. Will the Bush
Administration continue funding this effort? |
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The Reality of Simulation-Based
Acquisition - and an Example of U.S. Military Implementation
Randy C. Zittel |
(PDF file; size 2,815KB)
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Information technology is
creating more realistic, more capable, and more diver-sified
simulation tools. These tools have been applied to a
range of ongoing prod-uct development programs with
an increasing diversity of applications. Phenom-enal
reductions in development time, life-cycle costs, and
improved system qual-ity are reported from these new
opportunities. In contrast to simply networking more
and more computers and software together in ever-increasing
capability, entirely new approaches are emerging. One
overarching approach within the Department of Defense
is simulation-based ac-quisition.
It is the proactive use of simulation and information
technologies to rapidly advance all elements of the
product development process. It is capturing more elements
of industry every day and has the potential to revolutionize
product development all over again. Here we wiSoftll
examine one powerful example of simulation-based acquisition
implementation in the American and British Joint Strike
Fighter Aircraft Program. |
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| Winter
2001 |
Implementing Activity-Based
Management in an Acquisition Organization
Diana I. Angelis |
(PDF file; size 229KB)
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To manage costs and comply
with financial management laws and regulations, government
acquisition organizations must first understand what they
do and why they do it. This is critical to identifying
customers, defining outputs, and developing systems to
collect and trace the cost of resources to outputs. One
of the more popular models for collecting and tracing
costs is known as activity-based costing (ABC). This article
examines how one government acquisition organization is
using ABC to understand and define outputs and processes,
to collect and trace the cost of doing business, and how
it plans to use this information in the future. |
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The Persistence of Learning
and Acquisition Strategies
Patrick N. Watkins |
(PDF file; size 422KB)
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The acquisition strategies
implied by two theories of learning-learning curve theory
and knowledge depreciation theory-are quite different.
This article reexamines empirical data for land-based
weapon systems to determine if knowledge depreciation
theory can be confirmed. Results fail to confirm knowledge
depreciation theory and support learning curve theory.
The author concludes that acquisition managers should
continue to use learning curve theory to model their acquisition
strategies. |
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How the Acquisition Workforce
Adds Value
Michael Barzelay and Fred Thompson |
(PDF file; size 83KB)
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The Department of Defense is
committed to reducing the acquisition workforce, and there
is no question about the merits of this goal. But the
terms and concepts that dominate the acquisition reform
dialogue-a dialogue that has defined acquisition as merely
a matter of smart purchasing-are inadequate for the task
of determining which competencies should be retained and
which set aside. |
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Seeking Defense Efficiency
COL Ralph H. Graves, USA |
(PDF file; size 86KB)
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The drive for greater efficiency
in the Department of Defense has to date been characterized
by centrally directed efforts such as A-76 competitive
sourcing of commercial activities. The next stage of improving
defense management requires decentralizing the pursuit
of efficiency on a framework of strategic planning, cost
accounting, and performance measurement. A survey of some
pilot efforts to establish and use these business techniques
in DoD organizations finds promising beginnings in all
three areas. |
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Complexity: A Cognitive
Barrier to Defense Systems Acquisition Management
George H. (Tony) Perino |
(PDF file; size 91KB)
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Department of Defense acquisition
policy used to treat the modification of existing systems
to meet new or changing requirements as an aberration
rather than the norm. Little attention was paid to management
of iterative processes such as preplanned product improvement,
spiral development, or evolutionary acquisition. The recent
shift in policy toward evolutionary acquisition, as the
preferred approach to meeting operational requirements,
will require a paradigm shift regarding management of
defense systems acquisition programs. The Advanced Program
Management Course offered at the Defense Systems Management
College must be modified to support that shift. |
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| Fall
2001 |
Consolidation of the U.S.
Defense Industrial Base
John Deutch
|
(PDF file; size 85KB) |
The U.S. government has promoted
defense industry consolidation in the past decade as part
of its acquisition reform policies, to help control costs
and promote efficiency. But when the Department of Defense
(DoD) reversed its pro-consolidation policy, defense firms
were left financially less secure from the acquisitions
and mergers — and the hoped-for reductions in tangible
assets have been marginal. What is the best way forward? |
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Innovation the Federal Acquisition
Process
Through Intelligent Agents
LCDR David N. Fowler, USN, and Dr. Mark E. Nissen
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(PDF file; size 91KB) |
Information technology (IT)
developments are helping to improve many processes —
defense acquisition being one of them. One acquisition
reform initiative is to increase efficiency through leveraging
standardized IT applications such as the Standard Procurement
System (SPS). Benefits to date have been only marginal,
however — one reason being that their implementation
was accomplished without first redesigning the existing
inefficient process. This article examines opportunities
for innovation in the federal acquisition process, focusing
specifically on intelligent agent (IA) technologies that
offer potential for order-of-magnitude gains in terms
of performance. |
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The Role of Foreign Comparative
Testing
Programs in Army Modernization
LTC Camille Nichols, USA, Dan Grogan, and Raef
Schmidt
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(PDF file; size 65KB) |
This article illustrates how
acquisition programs are adapting to a military industrial
base that is undergoing reform-induced change. In search
of the best suppliers for combat optical and sensing equipment,
this program office successfully made use of foreign suppliers
to develop and manufacture a new generation of equipment. |
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Single Point Adjustments:
A New Definition with Examples
David C. Bachman
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(PDF file; size 147KB) |
Disciplined maintenance of
the Performance Measurement Baseline is essential for
Earned Value Management. A stable baseline provides the
earned value (EV) analyst with the metrics needed to bound
a project’s Estimate at Completion (EAC) range. A
single point adjustment (SPA) is made when a contract’s
existing cost and/or schedule variances are set to zero
and all the remaining work is replanned with the goal
of completing the project on schedule and on budget. The
SPA ob-scures past performance, collapses the EAC range,
and makes the resulting EAC unreliable. The origin of
SPA, four recent project SPAs, and the SPA effect on the
project’s EACs are examined. A new SPA definition
is recommended for EV glos-saries that currently omit
this topic. |
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Clipped Wings :
The Death of Jack Northrop's Flying Wing Bombers
Dr. Bud Baker
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(PDF file; size 516KB) |
One of the mysteries in defense
acquisition has concerned the fate of the Northrop Flying
Wing bombers, canceled by the Air Force more than 50 years
ago. Aviation experts have long suspected that the 1949
cancellations were motivated more by politics than by
the Wings’ technical shortcomings. However, using
public records, declassified Air Force documents, and
personal interviews, this research — never before
published — reveals that the cancellation of the
Flying Wings was a sound decision, based on budgetary,
technical, and strategic realities and the issues ad-dressed
here are as pertinent to defense acquisition today as
they were 50 years ago. Like today, decision makers struggled
to balance cost, schedule, and techni-cal performance.
They also had to deal with shrinking defense budgets,
a declin-ing defense industrial base, and a world situation
in which the only constant was change. Nearly all the
interviewees for this research — including Secretary
(and Senator) Symington, Generals LeMay, Norstad, and
Quesada — are gone now, but their recollections here
serve to make clear what really happened to the prede-cessors
of today’s B-2 bomber. The lessons of the Flying
Wings remain pertinent today. |
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