Statement of Rep. Tom Davis
Ranking Republican Member
Chairman Waxman and Subcommittee Chairman Tierney, thank you for agreeing to our request to convene this hearing on chronic and costly problems plaguing major weapons system programs at the Department of Defense. This is critical oversight that transcends party, as the challenges we’ll discuss today have been faced in some form or another by virtually every Administration since the earliest days of our republic.
The recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on 72 large-scale acquisitions once again found most program outcomes “sub-optimal.” Apparently, that’s understated auditor shorthand for “incredibly bad.” In the aggregate, the systems analyzed exceeded original budget targets by $295 billion and were 21 months behind schedule.
This Committee has spent substantial time and effort probing allegations of malfeasance and wrongdoing by contractors in Iraq and elsewhere. This GAO report reminds us there are far larger problems on the other side of the ledger, far from the war zone, where program managers continually fail to follow established best practices to measure the technical maturity and feasibility of these complex projects. To put these costs overruns in perspective: the $295 billion in cumulative cost growth found by GAO is more than 2,000 times the alleged overage in the State Department’s Bagdad Embassy project which the Committee continues to probe extensively. We welcome similarly sustained attention to deeply ingrained abuses and inefficiencies in weapons system programs already budgeted to costs many hundreds of billions of dollars.
As I said, the problems cited by GAO - systemic failures to refine requirements, acquire mature technologies, and capture production efficiencies - are not new. In 1794, Congress authorized construction of six frigates. In order to “spread the work among the several states as equitably as possible and with the greatest political advantage,” six private shipyards were leased to carry out the shipbuilding. The project was soon behind schedule. The six keels were not laid until the end of 1795; seventeen months after construction had been authorized. Subsequent mismanagement, delays and cost overruns resulted in scaling back the ultimate requirement to three frigates. Does any of this sound familiar?
From those frigates to the F-22, that has been the sad saga of weapons systems development throughout our history. In the modern era, major systems acquisition has been on GAO’s “High Risk” list for many years because DOD processes “have often proved costly and inefficient, if not wasteful.” In 1997, GAO found “many new weapon systems cost more and do less than anticipated, and schedules are often delayed.”
To address these issues, the Pentagon has convened any number of task forces, working groups, committees and commissions whose reports have resulted in sequential waves of promised reforms and layers of ambitious initiatives. But, as cautious GAO auditors often conclude, “Challenges remain.” Perhaps that’s because DOD reforms, as well as congressional attempts to tame this stubbornly inefficient process, have focused too often on symptoms while overlooking the root causes of chronic dysfunction in major system development projects. This GAO report blames a lack of skilled managers, overuse of contractor employees, and the tendency to “gold plate” new designs with immature technologies for cost, performance and schedule problems. But we’ve known about those issues in varying degrees for decades.
Today, we should look beyond the persistent symptoms to the broader, deeply ingrained personnel and management practices that can empower – or cripple – complex procurements like these. Freed from the Cold War imperative to beat the Soviets by rushing into high-risk production of new weapons platforms, we now have the opportunity to retool the major systems acquisition process. Technical knowledge and sound management decisions should drive programs to key benchmarks, not internal DOD budget duels or military service rivalries.
In this discussion, it has to be acknowledged these are highly complex, large-scale, inherently risky programs. Commercial and industrial best practices provide many valuable lessons but offer only limited wisdom about packaging and projecting lethal technology across continents. Very often this is rocket science, not an automobile assembly line, and some measure of budgetary risk, even the occasional failure, may be an unavoidable cost of doing this aspect of the nation’s vital defense business.
Oversight like this, when consistent and constructive, can help mitigate those inherent risks while modernizing and improving major acquisitions at the Department of Defense and throughout government. We appreciate the extensive body of work GAO has undertaken on this subject and we hope this will be the beginning of an extended, in-depth focus by the Committee on these issues.
