U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced some of the details of his 2010 budget “scrub” Monday, promising to “re-balance this department’s programs in order to institutionalize and enhance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead.”
The scrub killed off some programs, curtailed others and even expanded a few. Among the dead were the Air Force’s over-budget TSAT communications satellite and the manned-vehicle portion of the Army’s unproven, $160-billion Future Combat Systems. The end of these programs sounds the death knell for a disastrous experiment in government contracting.
With acquisitions workforces gutted by budget cuts, in the early 2000s, the Pentagon turned over contracting authority to private companies, who acted as “Lead Systems Integrators.” The catch was that integrators could award contracts to themselves, on government’s behalf. The result was an explosion of bloated, over-priced programs with poor oversight. The worst was the Coast Guard’s Deepwater shipbuilding scheme, which collapsed in 2007. TSAT and FCS were also integrator-led.
But now those programs are over (unless Congress intervenes), and so is the era of the Lead Systems Integrator. And to make sure we never again find ourselves in a position where we even need industry’s management help, in his Monday announcement Gates promised to hire thousands of additional Pentagon contract managers.
(Photo: via Defensetech)
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