Book Excerpt: Pruning The Acquisition Kudzu

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from “The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force,” a new book from Arnold Punaro. A retired Marine Maj. Gen. who also served as staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, Punaro is a fixture in Washington defense circles. “The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force” is available in bookstores and online.

Take a drive through parts of my home state of Georgia, and you can’t help but notice the thick vines blanketing the roadside. Known as kudzu, this invasive species has earned nicknames like “the vine that ate the South” for its rapid growth and resistance to any kind of controls. Kudzu grows relentlessly, climbing up telephone poles and creeping across wires, swallowing abandoned buildings and smothering trees and other plants in its shade.

Like so many ideas we now regret, kudzu’s introduction to the United States was built on good intentions. In the early 20th century, a government agency called the Soil Erosion Service actually paid farmers to plant kudzu to prevent erosion. Today, the “foot-a-night-vine” covers an estimated 7.4 million acres from Georgia to as far south as Florida, as far west as Texas, and as far north as New England. Less than a century after promoting it, the government added kudzu to the Federal Noxious Weed List.

Bureaucracy is a lot like kudzu. Starting from a place of good intentions, it grows steadily until it begins overshadowing and even smothering the beneficial programs and services it was meant to support. Before we know it, bureaucracy is so ingrained and self-perpetuating that it’s almost impossible to root out. Like any government agency, the Department of Defense (DoD) has not been immune from creeping bureaucracy. It is, however, unique among the federal agencies, departments, and bureaus in that its budget and presence, both in terms of people and facilities, dwarf all other parts of the U.S. government. Furthermore, its mission to keep the American people out of harm’s way is both a unique and vital function of government.

By any measure, the Defense Department is a leviathan of nearly inconceivable proportions. It is routinely recognized as the largest centrally directed and managed activity on the planet. It should not be surprising that running such an enormous, sprawling, global activity will inevitably present its leaders and those overseeing it with daunting challenges. That does not mean any effort to improve defense management is, by definition, futile; rather, it means that even marginal improvements in the management of DoD will have outsized impacts. Thus, anywhere the department can be more efficiently managed, improved, or streamlined, attempts must be made to do so on a continual basis.…

One area that warrants attention is DoD’s massive and inefficient acquisition system. We have a broken acquisition system that costs more, takes longer, and produces less, despite the Herculean efforts of recent leaders to improve it.

The DoD does not employ proven areas of business practices and processes when it comes to huge expenditures for goods and services, supplies, and equipment, despite the fact that
American industry has proven conclusively that significant savings are possible. In total, the most current federal procurement data reports that DoD spends $320 billion on contracts… a total sum that measures more than all the other government agencies combined. This cost alone consumes about 8% of the federal budget. Other estimates put the total annual spending in these areas [closer to] $400 billion, including prior year obligations.

Over the last 40 years, there have been close to 100 studies conducted and numerous laws enacted with hopes to “fix” the way DoD purchases goods and services, supplies, and
equipment. However, [these processes] have proven very resistant to change. The DoD acquisition [system] is further hampered by negative factors, including gold-plated requirements that are frequently changed; failure to meet schedules, performance, and quantities; significant cost overruns; and consistently poor management. In addition, DoD is suffocating under massive layers of bureaucracy as well as layers upon layers of rules and regulations.

While the acquisition leaders in both the Obama and Trump administrations, including Ash Carter, Frank Kendall, Ellen Lord, and others, attacked these problems and implemented positive changes, it is not how far we have come but how far we still have to go….

Today, we need to approach acquisition management with broad thinking and innovative approaches. This is especially important in order to shorten the acquisition cycle and accelerate the pace at which capabilities are placed into the hands of warfighters, a mission that is only increasingly imperative in today’s era of rapid technological advances. However, accelerating the acquisition cycle is, and will remain, largely dependent on simplifying complex and cumbersome processes that have become increasingly risk-averse.

We are at an inflection point in national security when “business as usual” and the status quo will allow China, our primary threat, to continue to advance militarily, technologically, economically, and diplomatically. We simply must get more bang for the buck with the defense dollars and reverse the trend of “the ever-shrinking fighting force.”

From “The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force” by Gen. Arnold L. Punaro, published by Punaro Press. Copy Copyright © 2021 by Arnold L. Punaro

Retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold L. Punaro is a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He recently released his second book, “The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force,” which is available now on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.