Aviation Week Publishes Grundman Opinion, “How to Fix Pentagon’s Broken Acquisition System”

26 August 2016 • 0 Comments

Wading into the debate ignited by the National Defense Authorization Bill over how best to revitalize acquisition management at the Pentagon, Steve Grundman worries that its provisions “are rooted in an ideology about how to fix acquisition that attributes too much significance to organizational structure and processes . . . [and] compounds the customary impulses of a system that instead requires a fresh mindset to address the challenge of defense innovation in the 21st century.”

Grundman laments what he calls the “ideology of the consumer applied to how we manage and regulate the acquisition of complex weapons systems”, arguing instead for an “investor-minded acquisition system [which] would place the abundance of its efforts, for example, on managing risk with portfolios, not controls; on motivating high performance with fabulous rewards, not sharp sticks; and on paying prices that reflect a deep understanding of an asset’s propensity to solve future warfighters’ problems and abate long-run costs, not simply a build-up of historical labor and material bills.”

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