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(60,364 posts)
Thu Jun 12, 2014, 10:38 AM Jun 2014

Congress, Please Don’t Treat IT Purchases Special: Kendall Aide

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/06/congress-please-dont-treat-it-purchases-special-kendall-aide/

Congress, Please Don’t Treat IT Purchases Special: Kendall Aide
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on June 12, 2014 at 4:29 AM

WASHINGTON: “Dear Congress: Please stop helping us. Sincerely, the Pentagon.”

That’s a form letter the Defense Department might do well to buy in bulk. It’s not what every administration official thinks every time a legislator comes up with an unsolicited bright idea, but when it comes to the thorny thicket of the military acquisition system, Congress’s attempts at reform have often just added to the problem. Now there’s another bright idea the Pentagon is trying to preempt: creating a special acquisition system for information technology.

Yes, IT moves fast and the current procurement system moves too slow, acknowledged Andrew Hunter, director of the Pentagon’s Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell (JRAC) and a point man for Undersecretary Frank Kendall on the Defense Department’s own in-progress package of reform proposals, slated for roll-out next year. But, Hunter warned the audience at the Brookings Institution Tuesday afternoon, he would “caution” against creating yet another process specifically to handle information technology.

“There’s high risk that it just furthers the problem rather than solving it,” Hunter told me when I pressed him for a blunter answer after his public remarks. “Having a separate system for this and a separate system for that — leave aside whether it’s IT or some other product or commodity — ultimately it’s just a set of inflexible systems rather than a single inflexible system,” he said with a grim laugh. “What we really need is the flexibility rather than the separate system.”
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