Cover Story
The Holy Grail of
Defense Reform
The elusive quest to fix the Pentagon’s broken acquisition system by DOV ZAKHEIM Defense acquisition reform has a long and distinguished record of failure. Ever since Robert McNamara attempted to reform a system that at the time was yielding cost overruns and schedule delays, successive secretaries and deputy secretaries of defense, legislators, and congressionallymandated commissions have proposed changes in the nature of DoD’s management, its organization, its bureaucracy, its processes, and its contracting methodology. And still programs overrun, and still schedules slip, and still there 4
are cancellations. Any effort to list all the attempts at acquisition reform would, at a minimum, call for an extended length article, if not a full length book. What follows is but an exceedingly brief overview of some of the many attempts to reform defense acquisition. The McNamara Approach Then-Secretary McNamara centralized defense management, introduced new methods for source selection
RIPON FORUM Spring 2014