What Do You See?

[FAR-flung 1102]

This question might be a little like asking my imaginative young son what he sees when he looks skyward on a day when puffy white clouds are gathered around us.   Largely speaking, what do you see when you consider changes in contracting policy over time? Do trends stand out to you? Or maybe it's cycles? Do you find pendulum -like swings between two extreme influences. Does it all look chaotic or random to you?  My first contracting chief taught me to look for a full cycle to be accomplished after three policy memos...he said he would keep the most recent three on file...I think what've he was saw cycles? Personally, I haven't made up my mind yet, but I'd like to know what you see.

[Guest Vern Edwards]

On September 7, 2016 at 2:50 PM, FAR-flung 1102 said:

Largely speaking, what do you see when you consider changes in contracting policy over time? Do trends stand out to you? Or maybe it's cycles? Do you find pendulum -like swings between two extreme influences. Does it all look chaotic or random to you?  

I see a system of people, organizations, rules, standards, processes, and practices that is designed to acquire goods and services that the Government needs. The system is characterized by four primary parameters: (1) time (how long it takes to acquire the goods and services), (2) cost (how much the Government pays for the goods and services and how much the participants spend to operate the system and participate in it), (3) quality (how well the goods and services meet the Government’s needs), and (4) compliance (how well agencies and contractors comply with the established rules and standards of practice and conduct).

The system never performs perfectly and will never satisfy everyone. Thus, there is always some dissatisfaction with it and tension between public expectations and reality. Occasionally, the dissatisfaction (which might be politically motivated and the subject of a lot of press attention) exceed a certain threshold. The resultant public outcry triggers responses—bouts of study or investigation, and of legislation, regulation, and policy development, all intended to correct the problem or just to mollify the public.

Examples of such triggered responses include the “Carlucci Initiatives” of the early 1980s, the reinventing government movement and the Services Acquisition Reform Act of the 1990s, DOD’s “Better Buying Power” initiative, launched about four years ago, and the acquisition reform legislation now pending in the House and Senate armed services committees.) After such bouts of responses, which in my experience typically last a year or two, but sometimes last longer, there is a period of relaxation and self-satisfaction. But time and events inevitably produce another buildup of dissatisfaction and tension and another bout of triggered responses.

You might say that dissatisfaction threshold breaches and the triggered responses are cyclical, but I think they tend to occur in irregular and sometimes unanticipated outbursts, like “sneaker” waves on the Oregon coast. Everything seems sunny and calm until there is an unexpectedly big wave that sweeps beachgoers out to sea and into the rip tide. The underlying physical forces that cause sneaker waves are always present, but they are latent. Children and inexperienced adults at the beach have a false sense of security, but experienced beachgoers are always on the lookout. They know that such a wave is coming eventually, they just don’t know when. Sometimes the contracting sneaker waves are big, prompted by events like Admiral Rickover’s battles with the shipbuilding industry over claims in the 1960s; the Air Force C-5A/Ernest Fitzgerald brouhaha; the spare parts pricing, Wedtech, and Operation Ill Wind scandals of the 1980s; the A-12 default termination of 1991 and the ensuing litigation; and the Coast Guard “Deepwater” program lead system integrator mess of the early 2000s.

If you work in the contracting system long enough, you'll live through several such dissatisfaction threshold breaches and bouts of corrective responses. In each instance the same issues will be discussed—contractor misconduct, the need for more and better competition, the need to make better contract type selections, excessive acquisition lead times, cost growth and overrun, schedule delays, high administrative burdens and costs, workforce competence, etc.

The thing is: the problems that give rise to dissatisfaction threshold breaches are inherent in a contracting system that operates under a government such as ours--a democratic republic. They were present in classical Athens, when people complained about the management and cost of Pericles’s public works program, the program that produced the monuments on the Acropolis, such as the Parthenon. (The Parthenon cost a lot, but it's a work of genius. The F-35 cost a lot, but it's... Well, we'll see.)

When contracting system problems arise and dissatisfaction thresholds are breached, politicians and public managers talk about the same issues and solutions because those issues are easy legislative and policy targets. It’s too hard to address the real problems, which are inherent in the way our government works. It’s too hard, because in order to solve the underlying problems you must first change the government itself. That would be like changing ocean dynamics in order to prevent sneaker waves. 

Thus, when it comes to contracting, there is no such thing as progressive reform. There is no overarching trend. There is only fitfully recursive reaction that is prompted by latent system dynamics.

[FAR-flung 1102]

Thank you, Vern.  I appreciate your thoughts and specific references...they seem like ballast that I might add to steady a small boat on the stormy waters. I will do my homework.