ECSS 'Mismanagement'

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) and Ranking Member John McCain (R-AZ) are pressing the Air Force for more information on what they call the "mismanagement" that led to the service's termination of the billion-dollar Expeditionary Combat Support System program.

"From what we know to date, this case appears to be one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent memory," the senators write in a letter sent today to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. "We believe that the public and the taxpayers deserve a clear explanation of how the Air Force came to spend more than $1 billion without receiving any significant military capability, who will be held accountable, and what steps the Department is taking to ensure that this will not happen again."

The Air Force's decision to cancel ECSS was a key piece in the service's plan to reach financial auditability by 2017, Inside the Air Force reported last month:

ECSS, led by prime contractor CSC until the company's contract was canceled earlier this year, was designed as a next-generation logistics program that could consolidate hundreds of legacy software systems and streamline supply chain management and many other functions. The program has failed to deliver those capabilities, though, and service spokesman Ed Gulick announced the program's termination in a Nov. 8 statement.

"The Air Force has concluded the ECSS program is no longer a viable option for meeting the FY-17 Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) statutory requirements," the statement reads. "Therefore, we are canceling the program and moving forward with other options in order to meet both requirements. As our acquisition and logistics leadership worked through the 3rd program restructure in the last 3 years, it became apparent the Air Force will be better served by developing an entirely new strategy versus revamping the ECSS system of record again.

"The scope of ECSS continues to decrease even as the costs continue to increase and the schedule continues to lengthen," Gulick continued.

Delays and cost overruns became a fact of life for ECSS in recent years. The Air Force says $1.03 billion has been spent on the program since 2005, with no significant military capability to show for it. Acting Air Force Under Secretary Jamie Morin told Congress earlier this year he was "personally appalled at the limited capabilities that program has produced relative to that amount of investment."

In their letter today, Levin and McCain state they want answers to the following questions:

1. What has the Air Force gained from the $1 billion it has spent on this program and what capabilities, if any, will be salvaged from the program?

2. What were the root causes of the failure of the ECSS program and why did it take so long for senior management to recognize these problems and cancel the program?

3. Why were previous efforts to restructure the ECSS program ineffective, and why did it take so long for senior management to recognize that they had been ineffective?

4. What changes will the Department make in the way that it manages its procurement of its other enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs to avoid similar problems in the future? In particular, what steps will the Department take to ensure: (1) appropriate software selection; (2) adequate government ERP program management skills; (3) consistency in ERP acquisition processes; and (4) an infrastructure able to support ERP performance needs?

5. What role did ineffective business process re-engineering (BPR) have in the problems the Air Force experienced with ECSS and how is this issue being addressed for future ERP programs?

6. What steps will the Department take to ensure that the prime contractor’s failure to perform as required is appropriately considered as past performance in connection with future DOD contract award decisions?

7. What steps has the Department taken to review its other ERP programs in light of this experience and to ensure that they are not suffering from problems similar to those experienced by ECSS?

8. What options is the Air Force looking at to replace ECSS and how much are these options likely to cost? When will a comprehensive plan be in place?

9. In the absence of ECSS, how does the Air Force intend to meet the original objectives of ECSS and meet the 2014 and 2017 audit-readiness deadlines?

10. If the Air Force is planning to rely on legacy systems as part of its mitigation approach, what steps is the Department taking to identify and assess these legacy systems to determine what modifications (including manual workarounds) will need to be implemented and when will the Department have a timeline in place for implementing these corrective actions?