Budget cuts in the 1990s forced the Pentagon’s skilled contracting workforce to shrink by more than half. When defense budgets doubled in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, this workforce was overwhelmed. So the Pentagon handed the responsibility for overseeing lucrative weapons programs to industry teams called “Lead Systems Integrators,” or LSI – essentially allowing defense contractors to award government contracts to themselves.One weapons expert says LSIs are like putting “a very juicy steak in front of a very hungry dog — and expecting the steak to still be there the next day.”
It took five years of waste and abuse for Congress to even begin trying to solve the problem. But efforts at reform have been thwarted by semantics, and by the difficulty in hiring and retaining government contracting experts. …
In 2005, Congress slightly tightened up cost reporting on Lead Systems Integrators; and the next year there was the new attempt at rules that was thwarted by [acquisition czar Kenneth] Krieg’s letter. Several times, the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, has questioned the LSI concept — most recently in June 2007, when it warned that Boeing’s management of Future Combat Systems “posed significant risks.”
Still, the reliance on integrators continues …
It takes years and tens of thousands of dollars to train up a good contract manager. The average acquisitions worker is now nearly 50 years old, up from 40 years old in the 1970s. And the existing workforce is set to dramatically shrink, despite a renewed recruiting push, since experienced employees will retire faster than new ones can be hired and trained, according to the January Pentagon panel. “The DoD acquisition workforce must be strengthened,” the Defense Science Board reported in July.
Nonetheless, this year Congress passed legislation to ban LSIs beginning in October 2010. Whether the ban will work is an open question. As the Senate’s 2006 exchange with weapons-buyer Krieg proved, there’s always some wiggle room within the definition of “Lead Systems Integrator.” If a contractor can make a good argument why the term shouldn’t apply to them, then the ban probably won’t either — and it’ll be business as usual.
Read the rest at The Washington Independent.
(Photo: BW Jones)
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