28 October 2014

Streamlining = Enabling Fraud, Waste, and Inefficiency

I am very dubious of this proposal to, "streamline military acquisitions."

Basically, the problem is a lack of adult supervision of either the defense contractors, or the Pentagon, or the resulting revolving door, is the problem with our current system,. not excessive regulation:
The Pentagon and Congress have better odds of reaching agreement on how to streamline myriad overlapping laws that slow the process of buying military equipment and services, a top Defense Department official said.

“I am optimistic,” Andrew Hunter, a former congressional aide who helped draft many of those laws before joining the Pentagon four years ago, told reporters Thursday. He said he saw emerging consensus among industry, lawmakers and defense officials about the need for changes.

Hunter, who runs the Pentagon’s joint rapid-acquisition initiative, also has led a drive to simplify current laws, which Frank Kendall, an arms buyer for the Department of Defense, has said put “an extraordinary and unnecessarily complex burden on our program managers and staff.”

U.S. defense officials have been in talks with congressional committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and hope to submit some reform legislation as part of the fiscal 2016 budget process, said Hunter, who is moving to a job with the Center for Strategic and International Studies next month.

“We’ve come up with some proposals that we hope will be favorably received,” he said. Hunter said the goal was to build on some key legislation already in place while giving program managers more flexibility to focus on the main issues.

The Pentagon initiative dovetails with fresh efforts by the House and Senate armed services committees to reform the slow, cumbersome U.S. military acquisition process and reverse years of schedule delays, cost overruns and other challenges.
Sorry, but the problem ain't excessive regulation, it's a system which is corrupt and dysfunctional to its core.

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