More Complex

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) today cited the coming 50th anniversary of Eisenhower's farewell address, the Jan. 17, 1961 speech warning against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex,” in delivering a Senate floor speech on the many ways the former president's admonition has not been heeded.

The “military-industrial complex has become much worse than President Eisenhower originally envisioned:  it's evolved to capture Congress,” the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said. “So, the phenomenon should now rightly be called, the 'military-industrial-congressional' complex.”

The Arizona lawmaker outlined parts of this network of influence -- spanning the executive and legislative branches and encompassing the defense industry -- and said it props up unnecessary defense spending. McCain, a longtime critic of funding set aside in spending bills by lawmakers for projects in their home districts, called such earmarks “the currency of corruption.”

The movement of high-ranking Defense Department personnel to defense firms and vice versa is “another manifestation” of the military-industrial-congressional complex, McCain said, before turning his attention to how the Pentagon buys its largest weapon systems -- a $1.7 trillion portfolio.

To be clear, the military-industrial-congressional complex does not cause programs to fail.  But, it does help create poorly conceived programs -- programs that are so fundamentally unsound that they are doomed to be poorly executed.  And, it does help keep them alive -- long after they should have been ended or restructured. . . .

With the federal budget deficit having hit $1.3 trillion for the 2011 budget year and facing the fact that the defense budget will likely not grow to any significant extent in the near-term, we in Congress must be mindful of how the military-industrial-congressional complex can negatively affect decisions to buy and keep major weapon systems.

McCain discussed efforts under way to improve defense acquisitions, then enumerated programs with procurement issues that have led to rising costs: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, the V-22 Osprey, the Space-Based Infrared System High, the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle, the Future Combat System, the Littoral Combat Ship, the F-22 Raptor and the DDG-100 Zumwalt Class Destroyer.

With his allocated speaking time running expiring, McCain skipped over many of the conclusions about how to improve procurement so the Senate could proceed to debating the fiscal year 2012 defense authorization bill. But the full version of his prepared remarks contains a lot more:

So, going forward, what can be done to prevent the havoc the military-industrial-congressional complex can wreak on how we buy major weapon systems?  Well, little can be done to disrupt the inherent biases of those who are the major forces in the military-industrial-congressional complex to maximize their own particular interests.  But, we can help the Department of Defense reform itself by developing a weapons procurement process that directly responds to the root causes of failure by, for example, starting programs on a solid foundation of knowledge with realistic cost and schedule estimates and budgeting to those estimates; locking in sufficiently defined requirements early; managing the cost, schedule and performance trade-space effectively to ensure that needed capability is procured within a fixed, reasonably short period of time; insisting on early and continued systems engineering; leveraging mature technologies and manufacturing processes; not procuring weapon systems that promise generational leaps in capability in a single bound; and definitely not doing so under cost-plus contracts.

We must also ensure transparency and accountability throughout, and use competition to encourage industry to produce desired outcomes and better incentivize the acquisition workforce to do more with less.  We should also embrace initiatives geared at making the government as skilled and knowledgeable a buyer as Industry is a seller.  With the right leadership, such approaches may help overcome the negative, pernicious effects of the military-industrial-congressional complex on how we buy major weapon systems.  And, given how tightly woven the military-industrial-congressional complex is into the fabric of our society and economy, this is all we can really hope for.

Only after implementing such an approach over a period of time and under the right leadership can one hope to see the most elusive of all behavioral improvements—enduring cultural change.  But, if achieved—and it most certainly can be—cultural change would be a powerful panacea to the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial-congressional complex in the defense procurement process.