Reforming Acquisition: This Time Must Be Different

Defense acquisition reform has been pursued for decades within the Department of Defense DoD, as cost and schedule growth has continued in major programs, and headline-grabbing incidences of waste, fraud, and abuse have gained the attention of Congress and the American public. Although countless reforms have been proposed and implemented, challenges within the defense acquisition system continue and may worsen in the face of emerging challenges, including continued budgetary pressure. Failure to address these problems will have negative impacts for our armed forces and national security policies. The current defense acquisition system is a product of decades of reform initiatives, legislation, reports, and government commissions. Major reform efforts began in the 1960s under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. His main reform efforts centralized control in the Office of the Secretary of Defense OSD, including the creation of the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System PPBS for resource allocation. Throughout the rest of the latter half of the 20th century, each administration left its own mark on defense acquisition, mostly focusing on the acquisition process itself and DoD management however, many ideas were recycled such as shifting decision-making authority between the services and the OSD, realigning oversight and accountability responsibilities, and altering the process itself milestones, phases, etc.. Major changes in DoD management ended with the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986, which codified the current chain-of-command in acquisition. Following the conclusion of the Cold War and the subsequent military drawdown, the focus of acquisition reform shifted onto the requirements generation and resource allocation processes, in addition to the acquisition workforce. Much of the 1990s reform efforts sought to streamline the acquisition process and become more efficient by buying commercial.