Today, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, made the following opening statement during the hearing, "Acquisition Reform: Experimentation and Agility.” Witness testimony can be found here.
"The committee begins 2016 continuing to focus our attention on defense reform to help ensure that the U.S. military is agile enough to meet the extraordinary demands of a complex, dangerous, rapidly changing world.
Last year’s NDAA included important first steps in our long-term effort to reform the way the Pentagon buys goods and services. In 2016, we will build on those efforts.
Technology and threats are evolving very rapidly. Our own acquisition system too often undermines our ability to get the warfighter what he or she needs to meet and counter these threats.
Generating and validating requirements, budgeting for funds, and contracting can each take two or more years, even before major acquisition programs are initiated.
After major acquisition programs begin, it takes eight to nine years, on average, before systems are developed and deployed to warfighters.
We cannot have an agile system if it takes us years to figure out what we want, how to fund it, who to hire, even before development begins.
Today’s hearing is intended to examine a number of questions and topics, but especially focusing on:
--Whether experimentation and prototyping new capabilities offers a means of improving agility; --And, what successes the military’s had with experimentation, as well as what obstacles the Pentagon has encountered.
And it seems to me that as one examines periods of the past where there was significant innovation in the military, experimentation was a key element, in some ways, even the heart of that innovation. It is a very critical component of where the United States needs to go."
