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Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain has two ideas for radically changing the way the Pentagon does its shopping.
No. 1: Each new weapon or service contract should have one person, preferably a service chief, sign off on it and take responsibility for it from start to finish. No. 2: That person’s military branch should pay a fine if the cost of the program goes beyond the original budget.
These two changes would represent an unhinging of the Pentagon as it now operates. They are some of the boldest provisions in the Senate’s defense authorization bill, propelled by McCain’s sense of urgency in curbing wasteful defense spending and also, tangentially, marking his place in the history books as a major Pentagon reformer.
“What the Pentagon has turned into is the absolute quintessence of ‘Everybody’s responsible, so therefore nobody is responsible,'” the Arizona Republican said in an interview.
DOD’s centralized system of acquisition has perversely created a situation in which the commanders who ultimately will use a weapons system can weigh in only on how it will work. They don’t have any authority over how it is researched, developed, or contracted. This inevitably leads to cost overruns because the proposed products get weighed down with unnecessary requirements dictated by people who, by design, see only one part of a bigger picture. If a Naval commander knew, for example, that his request for a gold-plated widget would add $1 million to the engine of a new submarine, he might determine that a copper-plated one will do. If he never knows the cost consequences of his requests, it’s hard to control the costs.
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