Former Army acquisition czar says 'thoughtful review' of R&D centers could be useful

Former Army acquisition chief Doug Bush, who departed his position last month, said today during the National Defense Industrial Association’s Power of Prototyping symposium that it would be useful to have a “thoughtful review” of the research and development offices within the Defense Department that specialize in innovation.

Bush spoke on a panel on George Mason University’s campus that was moderated by former DOD acquisition chief Ellen Lord. Bush, in response to an audience question fielded by Lord about whether there are too many R&D innovation centers, noted that over the last couple of administrations, the number of such offices has grown due to a “demand and concern that we weren’t pushing fast enough in certain tech areas.”

“That’s the department responding in the right way to a perceived need to support our troops. At the same time, it’s probably reasonable for this administration to consider looking across that and doing a little bit of consolidation wouldn’t be the worst thing. But not too far,” he said.

Consolidating these entities requires striking a balance that allows for “having the occasional small rogue entity that no one else will,” Bush said.

“It’s not always a bad thing. It’s a question of what’s the scale of dollars,” he said.

A review of innovation-themed offices ought to start at the Office of the Secretary of Defense level in the Pentagon, because “there’s a whole bunch of them, and a whole bunch of money,” Bush said.

“You could maybe save some money there and then reallocate it to other things in the services, for example, that also have merit,” he said.

Bush said a good approach for acquisition professionals in the military going forward is to build support both internally and with Congress in areas with broad appeal rather than “idiosyncratic things that one person is a fan of.”

“People in positions change. I know this can be maddening to industry. The Army might be all into something because a certain general is there, and all of a sudden the enthusiasm retires, and there’s a new general and they’re no longer interested,” he said.

Rapid prototyping of counter drone technology is an example of one area where investment over several years paid dividends, Bush noted. This could be seen following the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, 2023, he said.

“Oct. 7 happened, and then the U.S. military came under significant UAS attack across the Middle East. And yes, we took losses. There were lots of attacks, hundreds of attacks,” he said.

“Hundreds of lives were saved though, by the previous five years of work across two administrations working with [U.S. Central Command] on a range of really, off-the-shelf, highly innovative not-program-of-record counter UAS technologies that had been quietly fielded across the theater because of this building threat from Iran and its proxies. That’s a huge success, and it happened completely off the normal system.”