FBE560 Mergers, Acquisitions, and Restructuring

DOD should streamline its decision making process for weapon system to reduce inefficiencies

Primary goals of each reading

According to the report of December, 2014, the portfolio of the Department of Defence’s acquisition program consists of 78 diverse programs; with a total cost estimated around $1.4 trillion dollar. Out of these programs, 38 are oriented towards technology and logistics. These programs are also known as acquisition category programs or ACAT programs. The remaining 40 programs are specifically cognizant to the military service that is relevant with the acquisition executive authority. These programs are known as ACAT IC programs (Powell et al. 2019).

Primary DoD has categorized the weapon system acquisition process into three distinct milestones known as Milestone A, B and C. Milestone A revolves around the notion where a program is given green light to enter into the phase of maturation in terms of technological amendments and reduction of risk associated with the program. On the contrary, milestone B is engaged towards manufacturing engineering development of the program. Finally mile stone C dictates the deployment phase of the program.

The traditional approach of the DoD involves documenting every single policy which is associated with the weapon system acquisition. One of the significant drawbacks of this process is that it requires a massive amount of effort as well as time in reviewing and preparing the documentation. The cost overruns and the delays in the schedule that arises due to paper documentation far outweigh the benefits that the programs incur.  Therefore an inference can be drawn that the weapon system acquisition program has become cumbersome and bloated as a result of which it consumes a lot of time that could have been invested in other aspects of the acquisition program. The primary challenge in the weapon acquisition program is identifying the right equilibrium between successfully addressing the demands and effective oversight process on managing the procurement policies (McKernan et al. 2018).

Importance of Procurement law

Procurement law plays an immense important role in the field of weapon purchase by DOD. The main objective of the procurement law is to ensure that practices that are relevant in weapon acquisition programs are abiding by the predetermined standards of the procurement integrity act. The procurement integrity act which was passed by President Kennedy's executive order 10936. According to this act, identical bidding is deemed as ineffective in terms of determining the competitive bids. Identical bidding also gives the notion of conspiracies that would monopolize trade and commerce in terms of weapons acquisition by the DoD. Procurement law also aims to determine the loopholes that are currently in existence in the weapon system acquisition program by the DoD. The main goal of these laws is to make certain that procurement is done on knowledge based acquisition; to reduce chances of identical bidding or any similar malpractice. Thereby making the system of weapon acquisition more streamlined (Hunter, 2019).

Applicable government requirements

The documentations of the organisations that are bidding in the weapons system are reviewed meticulously by the government officials. The programs are then initiated as per the milestones. If the firms are commercial in nature then DoD opts for an alternative approach to make it more streamlined (McCormick et al. 2019).   

Conclusion

To conclude it can be pointed out that although DoD’s programs of paper documentation approach is slowing down the entire process of e-weapon acquisition. However the goal is not to eradicate the proper documentation entirely; it is to make the documentation approach more effective in nature. So that the problems can be recognized swiftly and remedial actions and incorporated eventually. The objective of paper documentation should be cost effective in nature. The current practices there in place require a lot of capital to manage the stakeholders of the DOD. For the sake of ensuring that the approach is streamlining its overall milestone approaches, opting for a pilot test program and carrying out the experiment on that program to make it more streamline would definitely assist the DoD’s weapon acquisition system (Alberts et al. 2017).

References:

Alberts, C., Haller, J., Wallen, C., & Woody, C. (2017). Assessing DoD system acquisition supply chain risk management. CrossTalk, 30(3), 4-8.

Hunter, A. (2019). The cycles of defense acquisition reform and what comes next. Tex. A&M J. Prop. L., 5, 37.

McCormick, R., Hunter, A. P., Cohen, S., & Sanders, G. (2019). Acquisition Trends, 2018: Defense Contract Spending Bounces Back. Rowman & Littlefield.

McKernan, M., Riposo, J., McGovern, G., Shontz, D., & Ahtchi, B. (2018). Issues with access to acquisition data and information in the Department of Defense: Considerations for implementing the Controlled Unclassified Information Reform Program. RAND NATIONAL DEFENSE RESEARCH INST SANTA MONICA CA SANTA MONICA United States.

Powell, L., Edwards, K. M., McGreevy, P., Bauman, A., Podberscek, A., Neilly, B., ... & Stamatakis, E. (2019). Companion dog acquisition and mental well-being: a community-based three-arm controlled study. BMC public health, 19(1), 1-10.

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