releases: https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ContentRecord_id=f6f24202-1d83-459b-a8dc-06def008f91f
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
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| https://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/floor-statements?ContentRecord_id=f6f24202-1d83-459b-a8dc-06def008f91f | OPENING STATEMENT BY SASC CHAIRMAN JOHN McCAIN AT HEARING ON NEXT STEPS FOR DEFENSE ACQUISITION REFORM | 2015-12-01 | 2015 | 2015-12 | Republican | House | AZ | John McCain | M000303 | www.mccain.senate.gov | legacy | Washington, D.C. U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, delivered the following opening statement today at a hearing on next steps for defense acquisition reform: The Senate Armed Services Committee meets this morning to discuss next steps for reforming the Pentagons broken acquisition system. Last week, the President signed theNational Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016into law. That legislation marked the beginning of a significant revamping of the defense acquisition system that has been broken for decades. Schedule delays and cost overruns are par for the course. Complex regulations and stifling bureaucracy impede innovation and restrict access to critical commercial technologies. Worse still, it seems no one in the defense acquisition system is ever held accountable for these repeated failures. Thats why in this years NDAA, Congress sought to improve access to non-traditional and commercial innovation by removing barriers to new entrants into the defense market, adopting commercial buying practices for the Defense Department, and ensuring these firms are not forced to cede intellectual property developed at their own expense. The NDAA also expanded flexible acquisition authorities and the development of alternative acquisition pathways to acquire critical national security capabilities. And perhaps most importantly, the NDAA took important steps to ensure accountability in the defense acquisition system. The NDAA gave greater authority to the military services to manage their own programs and enhanced the role of the service chiefs in the acquisition process. Services chiefs, service secretaries, service acquisition executives, and program managers will now sign up to binding management, requirement, and resource commitments. And if military services fail to manage a program effectively, they will lose authority and control over that program and be assessed an annual cost penalty on their cost overruns. This Committee will be watching closely to ensure the Department implements these reforms in keeping with both the letter and spirit of the law. At the same time, we will continue to press forward to make lasting reform a reality. It has been almost thirty years since the landmark Goldwater-Nichols Act and the Packard Commission. It has been twenty years since the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act and the Clinger-Cohen Act. In recent years, the Pentagon has been given unprecedented authorities to bypass the existing acquisition system and access new technologies and innovative companies. Yet today, the defense acquisition system is more risk-averse, costly, inefficient, and less open to commercial solutions than it was thirty years ago. This morning, we welcome a distinguished panel of witnesses to help us identify what else Congress can do to change the current incentive structure and culture to achieve improved acquisition outcomes that meet the needs of our service members and taxpayers: The Honorable Jacques Gansler, Chairman and CEO of the Gansler Group and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland. Mr. Gansler previously served as Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics in the Clinton administration; Mr. Norman Augustine, founder of In-Q-Tel, former Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin, and Acting Secretary of the Army; Mr. Ben FitzGerald, Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security; and Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dan Ward, a former Air Force acquisition officer who specialized in leading high-speed, low-cost technology development programs. We simply cannot tolerate the vast management failure that is the defense acquisition system. All too often, programs are delayed, over budget, and underperforming. Worse still, the Pentagon has wasted billions on programs that produced no combat capability whatsoever. $20 billion spent on the Future Combat System with little to show for it Over $1 billion spent on the Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS), a failed attempt to implement a commercial off-the-shelf logistics I.T. system that resulted in no useable capability for the Air Force $3 billion and 15 years spent on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) And $3.2 billion squandered on the Presidential Helicopter without ever fielding a single helicopter. And to think, we used to be able to field zero helicopters for free. Still, the management failures and the colossal waste of taxpayer dollars may not be the worst of our problems. As the bureaucracy fiddles and fails to modernize our forces, our adversaries are catching up with us in the development of critical defense technologies. At the same time, the Defense Department struggles to incorporate advanced commercial technologies into its operations as they become more widely available to our enemies. Our national security cannot rest on the assumption that our adversaries will be as inefficient and clueless as we are about buying defense capabilities. We have reached a critical inflection point. We are confronting an emerging technology gap with the commercial market in electronics, information security, robotics, communications, and data analytics. Combined with budget cuts that prevent us from modernizing our forces or deploying them in sufficient numbers around the world, such a gap will be disastrous, emboldening our adversaries and feeding instability. We must not allow any such technology and capability gap to grow. The United States has the greatest military in the world. But make no mistake, protecting our military technological superiority is the urgent work of today, not tomorrow. For acquisition reform to be successful, we must change the current culture of inefficiency, risk aversion, and complacency. There is only so much that legislation can do to accomplish this goal. It will require changing incentives and focused and continuous leadership from Congress, the Secretary of Defense, and industry. Every year we fail to do so, billions more in taxpayer dollars will be wasted and our military will be left less capable of performing its missions. That is dangerously unsustainable, that is what we must prevent, and that is why we must continue to press the cause of acquisition reform. I look forward to the testimony of our witnesses. ### | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |