Pentagon Taking Hatchet To Acquisition Regulations – 2,700 Rules Eliminated
- Ken Larson
- 7 minutes ago
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“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Stew Magnuson
“The strategy outlines 38 initiatives in five pillars: rebuild the industrial base; empower the acquisition workforce; streamline brittle processes; prioritize technical excellence; and resource system sustainment.“
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“The Pentagon in its campaign to eliminate red tape has excised thousands of Federal Acquisition Regulation rules from its books, a senior Defense Department official said Jan. 27.
Michael Duffey, undersecretary of war for acquisition and sustainment, said 2,700 FAR and Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement mandates have been eliminated so far.
Cutting the red tape began immediately after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the Acquisition Transformation Strategy Nov. 7, Duffey said in a keynote speech at the APEX Defense conference in Washington, D.C.
“We have a generational opportunity and a moral obligation to dismantle the slow, risk-averse bureaucracy of the past and build an acquisition system that delivers decisive capabilities at the speed of relevance,” he said.
The strategy outlines 38 initiatives in five pillars, he noted. They are: rebuild the industrial base; empower the acquisition workforce; streamline brittle processes; prioritize technical excellence; and resource system sustainment.
“Beginning Nov. 7, my team immediately began moving out to implement the strategy. Our dedicated workforce is working diligently to remove any barrier that gets in our way,” which includes cutting mandatory regulations, he said.
“It is the most ambitious revamping of the FAR and DFARS in recent memory,” he added.
“These eliminated mandates represent the death by a thousand cuts of excess regulatory requirements on both our government workforce and industry, removing the burdens of doing business with the Pentagon to invite new business and maximize innovation and competition,” he said.
“This is not a fantasy. Every element of this vision is possible. We have the technology, we have the talent, we just need the will,” he said.
That includes giving acquisition professionals the freedom to fail, he said.
“We are creating a culture in the Pentagon acquisition that celebrates intelligent failure. I want to see prototypes that don’t work. I want to see tests that fail spectacularly. Why? Because a failed prototype is not a wasted effort. It’s tuition paid on the path to victory. It’s a lesson learned faster and cheaper than if we had waited five years to design all the risk out before the test was attempted. We must test, we must learn, we must fail, and we must learn again faster than anyone else on the planet.”
“I think it will be a painful transition, but I think it will emerge in outcomes,” he added.
One of the 38 initiatives in the new strategy is to create scorecards to measure how well those who hold the newly created title of portfolio managers are doing when executing their missions, he said.
“We’re working through what kind of metrics do we want to measure ahead of outcomes that give us the clearest, most precise insight into whether or not we’re headed down the right path,” he said.
Meanwhile, instead of dictating to industry exactly what the U.S. military needs, the portfolio managers will lay out the problems that need solving, he said.
The Pentagon currently has three priority problems it wants help with: to be able to see and communicate in a denied environment; defeat swarms of autonomous drones; and deliver supplies to distributed forces under constant threat, he said.
“Then we challenge the brightest minds in this room and across the nation, in our labs, our startups, our commercial and defense corporations alike, to compete on a level playing field to solve our hardest problems. We unleash innovation instead of constraining it,” he said.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stew Magnuson is the Editor in Chief of National Defense Magazine.
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