Tossing Darts at the System
The Pentagon is taking its own sweet time in deciding how to buy planes, tanks and machine guns that work, and at a price that doesn’t hide payoffs to industrial spies.
David Packard, former deputy defense secretary and one of the nation’s wealthiest men, told a Senate committee one way to go about it last week: Tack bids from qualified defense contractors onto a wall and throw darts at them. It would, he said, save time and money.
Packard, founder of Hewlett-Packard, a Palo Alto electronics firm, was the chairman of a commission appointed two years ago to recommend changes in the way the Defense Department buys weapons and supplies.
Among other changes, the commission proposed the enacting of two-year defense budgets, based on some coherent strategy of how weapons might be used and where, and stretching out the time over which weapons are bought so as to avoid the temptation to buy everything at once.
The commission also urged the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discourage every military service from scrambling to duplicate the weapons and missions of every other. And it urged members of Congress to stop adding items to the defense budget that the Pentagon did not want or need just so that firms at home could get defense contracts.
None of these sensible suggestions had been carried out to the satisfaction of Packard when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, and he was not pleased.
The services still promote individual strategies and “their pet weapons” without regard to the effect on overall security. Congress still indulges itself in the “disgraceful” practice of bringing home the defense bacon. Administration efforts to introduce competition among contractors has done more harm than good.
And letting the defense industry submit one “best and final offer” after another when it is bidding on weapons contracts, Packard said, amounts to “operating military acquisition like an Iranian bazaar.” According to reports from Washington, letting contractors change their bids two or three times or more was a big factor in the shadowy world of defense consulting, with contractors paying whatever was needed to find out what their competitors’ final offers might be.
Packard’s complaint about Congress did not stop at its padding the defense budget for home consumption. In trying to stop petty theft, he said, Congress has insisted on so much red tape that new rules and paperwork have added $10 billion to defense costs. He also lectured Congress for trying to pump competition into a system where it cannot be achieved.
It is not too much to hope that the man who is elected the next President will know precisely what Packard is saying and exactly what to do about it within, say, an hour after he takes the oath of office next January.
