Defense procurement

How to Sneak New Weapons Past Government Minders

When U.S. Army leaders decided they needed an upgraded version of the M-1 Abrams tank, they wanted to get it without enduring what they consider to be a cumbersome formal acquisition process.

Any program of this scale would ordinarily be classified as a Major Defense Acquisition Program and be subject to the oversight reviews and regulations that status entails. To avoid this, Army leaders claimed a major modernization effort to a weapon central to their very identity was a mere design tweak, and managed the project through the far less rigorous Engineering Change Proposal process.

This is a problem. The MDAP process may be cumbersome, but its intended purpose is to ensure the Pentagon properly evaluates its needs and then enters into programs that will properly meet them. It is also meant to exert the kind of pressure necessary to keep costs under control.

While the system is indisputably flawed — the F-35 is an MDAP — the services should not be permitted to simply ignore the laws. Doing so will almost certainly result in weapons of dubious combat value and more cost overruns.