TRANSCRIPT
SEN. CARL LEVIN, CHAIRMAN, SENATE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
WITNESSES: SECRETARY OF DEFENSE ROBERT M. GATES; ADMIRAL MIKE MULLEN (USN), CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF; TINA JONAS, UNDERSECRETARY OF DEFENSE (COMPTROLLER)
CHAIRMAN LEVIN:
Senator Akaka.
SENATOR AKAKA:
Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to welcome our witnesses, Mr. Secretary and Admiral Mullen.
As a result, Secretary Gates, as a result of the remediation for the problems identified at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, DOD and VA are currently cooperating and collaborating, I would say, on an unprecedented level.
Secretary Gates, do you believe that the departments can sustain the current level of cooperation and collaboration? And how will this be administered?
SECRETARY GATES:
Well, I think that one of the things that has played a critical role in bringing the departments together and making sure that the various levels of the departments are doing what they're
supposed to be doing, in terms of both the Dole-Shalala recommendations, the legislation that you all have passed, and others, is the fact that the deputy secretary of defense, Gordon England, and the deputy secretary of veterans affairs, meet every week.
And their subordinates are in the room. And they have a checklist of what they're supposed to do. And they are methodically working through it. And I think and I believe -- I am confident that
this practice will continue, certainly for as long as Gordon England and I are in our positions.
I think that it's -- when you are sitting up here a year from now confirming a new secretary of defense, it seems to me that that provides a useful opportunity to encourage that secretary to continue this practice, because that's what it takes, frankly. It takes top-level attention, and it takes short deadlines for getting things done. And it has worked, and it's really worked remarkably well. But it requires continued top-level attention.
SENATOR AKAKA:
Well, I want to thank you for placing that in the record. And I'm so glad to see that continue to happen. Some have suggested, Secretary, that a permanent, joint DOD and
VA transition office be established. Do you have any thoughts about that?
SECRETARY GATES:
I'm very open to this, because my approach -- when we started dealing with this problem, I said, "You know, we need to look at this from the standpoint of the soldier or the sailor or the airman or the Marine."
You know, forget all these bureaucracies. Forget all these different org charts and everything else. I'm a soldier. I've been wounded. Or even if I haven't been wounded, how do we create a
structure that makes the -- this is perhaps a contradiction in terms and so idealistic it sounds naive -- but that, in effect, makes the bureaucracy the ally of the soldier, not the adversary, and a seamless transition, so that the bureaucracy smoothes the way, rather than making it a series of obstacles to be overcome?
I think you can do that. And I'm open to -- as we were doing a lot of the wounded warrior things, I said, "Go out and just interview some wounded soldiers and tell them, if you had a clean sheet of paper, based on your experience so far, how would you design this system? What would you make it look like?"
So I'm open to anything that's going to make the bureaucracy more user-friendly to those who have served.
SENATOR AKAKA:
Thank you for those responses, Secretary.
Secretary, given the increased interaction between DOD and VA, disagreements could occur that can't be resolved over jurisdiction or responsibility between DOD and VA within either the DOD-VA Joint Executive Council or the DOD-VA Senior Oversight Committee.
In these cases, who do you think is responsible for brokering these disagreements between the two departments? And how would the process work?
SECRETARY GATES:
Well, happily, we haven't had any of those yet. I would assume that if there were a really tough problem that couldn't be solved by the deputies that it would come to Secretary Peake and myself.
And I find it difficult to imagine that we couldn't come to an agreement. But if for some reason we couldn't, then clearly the next step would be to take the issue to the president.
SENATOR AKAKA:
Well, I want to thank you also for mentioning seamless transition, because we have been working on that, and we have been working here, as Armed Services Committee, as well as the Veterans Committee, on that.
Many of the programs currently under development, Mr. Secretary, at DOD continue to be delayed or experiencing cost overruns. The GAO report just released February 1st identified 11 programs that are the result of poor department acquisition practices and reiterates some of the issues brought out in the testimony at the end of the last congressional session.
Some failures identified include over-reliance on testing (ph), immature technologies, and early entry into signed contracts prior to a thorough engineering analysis, both of which drastically drive up costs on these programs.
Secretary Gates, what is the status of ongoing efforts within the Department of Defense to improve the efficiency of the acquisition process?
SECRETARY GATES:
I think you could probably fill this room with studies of the Department of Defense acquisition process over the past number of decades.
We have a new undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, John Young. And John has tried to lay out for his entire group a new approach to acquisition that tries to minimize the kinds of problems that you've just described.
And I would invite -- and I'm happy to have Mr. Young come up and talk to you about it, or come up and talk to the committee, because I think -- I mean, one of my real regrets is that Mr. Young is only going to have a little over a year in office, because I think he's on the right track, and I think he's got it right.
There's another problem, though, and someone alluded to it at the very beginning of the hearing. In the 1990s, for two reasons, one, four successive national defense authorization acts that required the department to reduce the number of acquisition officers by 95,000 people all together and the department's own actions to reduce personnel because of the budget, that took the number of acquisition people in the Department of Defense, people working acquisition issues, from something like 620,000 to fewer than 300,000.
And maybe more importantly, between 1990 and now, the Defense Contract Management Agency dropped from 24,000 contract experts to just over 9,000.
So one of the things we have to do is figure out, how many is the right number to be involved in managing these contracts? Because it seems to me, given the problems we've had in Iraq and the problems we've had that you alluded to, that the number where we are now probably isn't right.
One of the things that the Army has done -- there's been a lot of criticism and a lot of justifiable criticism about contracting problems in Iraq. We had 63 contract managers in Iraq until December of 2007. We now have over 300 that the Army has sent out, the Army alone has sent out there.
So it's clearly partly a process problem, but it's also a resource problem. And I think we're trying to address both of those. But I invite the committee and I invite you to sit down with Mr.
Young, because I think some of the programs he's putting in place are quite valuable.
SENATOR AKAKA:
Thank you very much, Secretary.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
CHAIRMAN LEVIN: Thank you, Senator Akaka.
-30-
