Expanding rapid prototyping is only a first step toward fixing the Defense acquisition system

The Department of Defense (DOD) continues to grapple with its unwieldy acquisition system, even as China exploits new technologies to enable it to defeat American forces in an armed confrontation in the Pacific. Seeking to ensure that the United States can maintain its technological lead, the DOD has asked Congress to permit the military service secretaries to shortcut the weapons development approval process “by starting development activities in the year of execution … instead of waiting in the two-year budgeting cycle for funding or new start authorization.” 

The effect of this change would be to enable the military service secretaries the limited ability “to internally initiate … [urgent] acquisition, in order to start development activities for up to $300 million dollars for advanced component development and prototypes and system development and demonstration activities up to a Preliminary Design Review level of maturity for a future program of record.” 

The basis for the DOD proposal is a series of provisions, first initiated in fiscal year 2003 legislation and updated several times since, that empower the DOD with “rapid acquisition authority.” These provisions authorize the department to allocate previously appropriated funds for various categories of needs, to include “compelling national security needs requiring the immediate initiation of a project under the rapid fielding or rapid prototyping acquisition pathways” in accordance with legislative provisions governing this activity. The department notes that this authority currently applies only to items under development or available on the commercial market, but not to promising technologies not yet programmed. 

The DOD, therefore, is seeking to give the service secretaries opportunity to exploit such technologies even if they are not yet in the defense program. The department’s justification for its request is simply that China is forging ahead with high-tech development without the restrictions that DOD faces. The department asserts that “our pacing challenge, China, is moving aggressively to field systems designed to defeat the U.S. and our standard practices are not responsive to this threat.” 

The DOD proposal also would constitute an end-run around the restrictive impact of continuing resolutions on its ability to undertake new programs. Continuing resolutions severely limit any new program activity that was not in the previous fiscal year’s approved budget. As a result, a new start could be subject to serious delays until Congress passes a budget for the next fiscal year. It is not at all clear, however, that the appropriations committees will go along with DOD’s proposal, despite the bipartisan congressional consensus that China poses a major threat to America’s technological dominance. 

The appropriations committees, in particular, have tended toward restricting, rather than expanding, DOD’s spending authorities. For example, in addition to prohibiting the inclusion of new starts in continuing resolutions, over the years the appropriations committees have lowered the threshold below which the department could avoid requiring congressional approval for moving research and development funds. That threshold previously was $15 million; it is now $10 million. That number represents a tiny fraction of the Biden administration’s fiscal year 2024 research and development budget request of $145 billion. 

It is therefore problematical whether the appropriators will tolerate the degree of flexibility in new start development that the department requests. Even if Congress were to approve the department’s request, it is not at all clear that new technologies would be fielded with anything like the rapidity that the Pentagon anticipates. There would remain a considerable distance between the preliminary design review and actual fielding. Indeed, as the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption points out in a recently released report, “The DOD spends billions annually on research and development, yet only a small percentage transitions to production contracts with revenue to sustain operations and scale output.” 

In other words, even if DOD were to acquire prototypes from the commercial sector, the department still might fail to avoid the other components of what has come to be called “the valley of death” — namely, long timelines to finalize contracts, program constraints such as the need to meet military specifications, and general bureaucratic inertia. 

For Congress to grant the service secretaries the ability to initiate new starts while a continuing resolution remains in force is certainly a good first step toward enabling the DOD to exploit the latest technological advances, be they developed commercially or by the department itself. But that would constitute only a first step. The entire acquisition system, whose roots can be traced to the Kennedy administration, requires a complete overhaul. Numerous studies, of which the Atlantic Council’s is the latest, have offered a host of recommendations to drag the system into the 21st century. It is high time the department and Congress implement them.

Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was under secretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy under secretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.