In Defense Industry, A Souring Mood On Acquisition Reform

When Trey Obering was deputy director of the Defense Department’s missile defense agency in 2002, he was asked to fix one of the most troubled acquisition programs in recent history. The airborne laser — a modified Boeing 747 jet that carried a megawatt laser to shoot down ballistic missiles — was handed over by the Air Force to MDA after eight years of nonachievement.

What Obering discovered was an epitome of procurement dysfunction. The Air Force had assembled a “standing army” of managers and engineers who were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on studies and design reviews before anyone ever fired the laser for the first time, says Obering, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and now a senior vice president at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

“We said, ‘Stop that.’ We are not going to pay for any more engineers. We want you to focus on firing the laser and taking the aircraft off to fly it,” Obering recalls during a recent interview. It took another two years to finally fire the laser, but technical accomplishments were not enough to save the program, which was terminated in 2010 after 14 years in development and projected cost estimates of about $1.5 billion per aircraft...