Weapons in the Warehouse
Who's against efficiency in Pentagon procurement? You may be surprised.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, June 29, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT - WSJ.com
After more than a year of battling insurgents, the Pentagon has yet to get some essential equipment to the combat troops in Iraq. Servicemen are living--and sometimes dying--without armor plating for their vests, steel plates for their vehicles, and handheld electronic devices that can block the signals used to detonate the roadside bombs that have killed scores of American soldiers. We've all heard of the Pentagon's $300 hammer. But what's really outrageous is when the military bureaucracy buys equipment and then fails to get it to the battlefield.
It would seem a no-brainer then for Congress to get behind a system to speed up delivering essential materiel. But that's not what happened when Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, introduced legislation to allow the secretary of defense to bypass the military's bureaucracy to meet urgent battlefield needs--even running down to Home Depot or Radio Shack, if necessary.
Indeed, looking at Mr. Hunter's bill, it's hard to find much to object to. He proposes to create a Rapid Acquisition Authority, which would introduce accountability into the normally faceless bureaucracy that handles requests from the field. It would also require the Pentagon to get congressional approval for the new streamlined process, and it would only kick in when American troops suffer combat casualties. It isn't meant to replace the acquisition system, but rather to serve as a bridge between the normal process and emergency needs. And it doesn't cost anything extra, for it would be funded out of existing military budgets. Truth be told, it would probably save money.
There's also little doubt that it would work. The Army ran a similar program successfully in Afghanistan. In that conflict part of the 82nd Airborne and all of the 101st Airborne found themselves without vital equipment as the invasion neared. Realizing the calamity that could ensue, the Army brass quickly rolled out the Rapid Fielding Initiative, and in a matter of days and weeks got equipment to the troops that normally would have taken months or even years to deploy.
One of Mr. Hunter's motivations came this past year when he saw tons of steel plating needed in Iraq, which had long been approved and fully tested for combat use, just sitting in an Army depot while acquisition officers ran even more tests. He finally managed to get the bureaucracy to ship that steel to where it could do some good. But that logjam is proving to be nothing compared with what he's finding in Congress. When his bill came up for a vote two weeks ago--as a standalone bill--the tally was 285-97 in favor. Leading the opposition was the Congressional Black Caucus, apparently concerned that preferences in government contracting would go by the boards. Of the caucus's 36 members, 18 voted against the bill and another 10 abstained. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi also abstained--despite her repeated attacks on the administration for not getting necessary equipment to the troops.
In the Senate, partly because of the organized opposition in the House, the legislation is having an even rougher time. The office of John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, says the senator hasn't had time to even look at the bill and "therefore has no position on it." As for Mr. Warner's Democratic counterpart, Sen. Carl Levin's office assured me the bill would not come up for a vote at all.
That's not the last word of course. The Republican leadership could always reverse course and allow an up-or-down vote. More likely, however, Mr. Hunter--who also attached his bill as an amendment to the defense authorization bill--will have to fight for it behind closed doors when the two chambers meet to hammer out the differences between their two bills. That process likely won't be completed until after Congress's August recess.
The holdup here isn't money. The Pentagon's budget is already well north of $400 billion, and Congress is in the process of adding almost 10% to that. Nor is Mr. Hunter's bill loaded down with pork. Indeed, it may strip away reams of paperwork, and it runs only a few paragraphs. Of course, that's exactly the problem. Rapid Acquisition Authority is too lean for a city that loves its fat. |
