Current law should be changed to designate the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) as the principal uniformed military advisor to the President, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense, representing his own views as well as the corporate views of the JCS. Current law should be changed to place the Joint Staff and the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the exclusive direction of the Chairman, to perform such duties as he prescribes to support the JCS and to respond to the Secretary of Defense. The statutory limit on the number of officers on the Joint Staff should be removed to permit the Chairman a staff sufficient to discharge his responsibilities. The Secretary of Defense should direct that the commands to and reports by the Commanders-in-Chief of the Unified and Specified Commands (CINCs) should be channeled through the Chairman so that the Chairman may better incorporate the views of senior combatant commanders in his advice to the Secretary. The Service Chiefs should serve as members of the JCS. The position of a four-star Vice Chairman should be established by law as a sixth member of the JCS. The Vice Chairman should assist the Chairman by representing the interests of the CINCs, co-chairing the Joint Requirements Management Board, and performing such other duties as the Chairman may prescribe. The Secretary of Defense, subject to the direction of the President, should determine the procedures under which an Acting Chairman is designated to serve in the absence of the Chairman of the JCS. Such procedures should remain flexible and responsive to changing circumstances. Subject to the review and approval of the Secretary of Defense, Unified Commanders should be given broader authority to structure subordinate commands, joint task forces, and support activities in a way that best supports their missions and results in a significant reduction in the size and numbers of military headquarters. The Unified Command Plan shou, i evised to assure increased flexi: geographic boundaries of the current combatant commands and with changing world conditions. bility to deal with situations that overlap For contingencies short of general war, the Secretary of Defense, with the advice of the Chairman and the JCS, should have the flexibility to establish the shortest possible chains of command for each force deployed, consistent with proper supervision and support. This would help the CINCs and the JCS perform better in situations ranging from peace to crisis to general war. The Secretary of Defense should establish a single unified command to integrate global air, land, and sea transportation, and should have flexibility to structure this organization as he sees fit. Legislation prohibiting such a command should be repealed. III. Acquisition Organization and Procedures ction within the Administration and in Congress to improve national security by the Commission-will provide the element of stability required for substantial improvement of the acquisition system. This element is critical, and has been missing. While significant savings can be and have been made through better procurement techniques, more impressive savings will come from eliminating the hidden costs that instability imposes. Our study of acquisition reveals, and our collective experience fully confirms, that there are certain common characteristics of successful commercial and governmental projects. Short, unambiguous lines of communication among levels of management, small staffs of highly competent professional personnel, an emphasis on innovation and productivity, smart buying practices, and, most importantly, a stable environment of planning and funding—all are characteristic of efficient and successful management. These characteristics should be hallmarks of defense acquisition. They are, unfortunately, antithetical to the process the Congress and the Department of Defense have created to conduct much of defense acquisition over the years. With notable exceptions, weapon systems take too long and cost too much to produce. Too often, they do not perform as promised or expected. The rea sons are numerous. Over the long term, there has been chronic instability in top-line funding and, even worse, in programs. This eliminates key economies of scale, stretches out programs, and discourages contractors from making the long-term investments required to improve productivity. Federal law governing procurement has become overwhelmingly complex. Each new statute adopted by Congress has spawned more administrative regulation. As law and regulation have proliferated, defense acquisition has become ever more bureaucratic and encumbered by unproductive layers of management and overstaffing. Responsibility for acquisition policy has become fragmented. There is today no single senior official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) working full-time to provide overall supervision of the acquisition system. While otherwise convinced that the Secretary should be left free to organize his Office as he sees fit, the Commission concludes that the demands of the acquisition system have become so weighty as to require organizational change within that Office. In the absence of such a senior OSD official, policy responsibility has tended to devolve to the Services, where at times it has been exercised without the necessary coordination or uniformity. Authority for acquisition execution, and accountability for its results, have become vastly diluted. Program managers have in effect been deprived of control over programs. They are confronted instead by never-ending bureaucratic obligations for making reports and gaining approvals that bear no relation to program success. Deficiencies in the senior-level appointment system have complicated the recruitment of top executive personnel with industrial and acquisition experience. Recent steps to improve the professionalism of military acquisition personnel have been made within the Department of Defense and reinforced by legislation. The existing civilian personnel management system has not, however, allowed similar improvements in career paths and education for civilian acquisition personnel. To attract and retain a good work force requires a more flexible system for management of contracting officers and other senior acquisition personnel-one comparable to the successful system for scientists and engineers recently demonstrated at the Navy's China Lake Laboratory. Major innovations in personnel management and regulations are needed. The Commission's recommendations in this critical area can and should be acted upon quickly and are of the highest priority. A better job of determining requirements and estimating costs has been needed at the outset of weapons development. More money and better engineering invested at the front end will get more reliable and better performing weapons into the field more quickly and cheaply. For example, recent improvements in budgeting to most-likely cost have demonstrated that this approach can result in a reduction in overruns. All too often, requirements for new weapon systems have been overstated. This has led to overstated specifications, which has led to higher cost equipment. Such so-called goldplating has become deeply embedded in our system today. The current streamlining effort in the Defense Department is directed at this problem. Developmental and operational testing have been too divorced, the latter has been undertaken too late in the cycle, and prototypes have been used and tested far too little. In their advanced development projects, the Services too often have duplicated each other's efforts and disfavored new ideas and systems. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has not had a sufficient role in hardware experimentation and prototyping. Common sense, the indispensable ingredient for a successful system, has not always governed acquisition strategies. More competition, for example, is beneficial, but the mechanistic pursuit of competition for its own sake would be inefficient and sacrifice quality-with harmful results. Multi-year procurement, baselining, and the use of non-developmental items all entail costs to management flexibility, but would yield far greater benefits in program stability. The Defense Department has initiated some baselining (the B-1 is an example) and has made progress in gaining congressional acceptance of multi-year contracting. In sum, the Commission finds that there is legitimate cause for dissatisfaction with the process by which the Department of Defense and Congress buy military equipment and material. We strongly disagree, however, with the commonly held views of what is wrong and how it must be fixed. The nation's defense programs lose far more to inefficient procedures than to fraud and dishonesty. The truly costly problems are those of overcomplicated organization and rigid procedure, not avarice or connivance. Chances for meaningful improvement will come not from more regulation but only with major institutional change. Common sense must be made to prevail alike in the enactments of Congress and the operations of the Department. We must give acquisition personnel more authority to do their jobs. If we make it possible for people to do the right thing the first time and allow them to use their common sense, then we believe that the Department can get by with far fewer people. The well-publicized spare parts cases are only one relatively small aspect of a far costlier structural problem. Each spare parts case has its own peculiarities, but there are several major recurring causes that are systemic in nature. Many of these causes have been identified by the Defense Department. It is undoubtedly important to buy spare parts with care and at reasonable cost. It is yet more important not to let the spare parts cases lead us to ignore larger problems or, even worse, to aggravate them. Policy makers must address the root causes of inefficiency, not dwell on marginal issues. The prescription we offer for those larger problems will, we believe, result in savings on major weapon systems and minor spare parts alike. |