Grundman Discusses Defense Authorization Bills on “This Week in Defense News with Vago Muradian”

Appearing in two segments of Sunday’s broadcast, Grundman discusses his views about the defense reform proposals embodied in the defense authorization bills for 2016 that have been proposed by the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate. Responding to Muradian’s question about the Senate bill’s the far-reaching reallocation of authority over acquisition management, Grundman said, “The problem in some fundamental way with acquisition management is the difficulty of bringing into alignment three things: requirements, system performance–what the thing is going to do relative to those requirements–and what it’s going to cost and over what period of time. Getting those things into alignment in the existing system is a shared and ‘team” responsibility, which is very . . . hard. . . . One reading of the McCain bill is that it is going to concentrate the authority and accountability for getting those three things into alignment in the hands of someone who actually has a lot of power and expertise with which to do it. I favor giving this approach a try. . . . [I]t’s not as if it divorces OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] from exercising any authority over how the Services go about this.”

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