Statement of Donald Mancuso Deputy Inspector General Department of Defense Before the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support of the Senate Committee on the Armed Services on Defense Acquisition

摘要

The Defense Reform Initiatives are the Department's corporate strategy to adapt better business processes, pursue commercial alternatives and eliminate redundancy through consolidation and streamlining. The Department has also adopted a vision of becoming a world-class buyer of best value goods and services from a globally competitive industrial base. In this regard the DoD hopes to achieve this transformation through rapid insertion of commercial technology, basic business process improvements, creating a workforce that is continuously educated and retrained to operate in new environments and institutionalizing improvements through change insertion. In order to fulfill these goals, the Department has initiated an unprecedented number of major improvement efforts across the spectrum of DoD activities, including at least 40 significant acquisition reform initiatives. The Department has made notable progress in acquisition reform and has also set several commendable goals. Examples include: * de-emphasizing overly detailed military specifications and standards; * using credit cards for nearly 9 million small purchases in FY 1999; * pushing for public and private sector implementation of public key infrastructure technology to enable secure electronic commerce; * replacing multiple, inconsistent, government-unique requirements imposed on contractors holding more than one Defense contract with common, best, facility-wide processes; and * establishing aggressive weapon system unit cost and total ownership cost targets, which are 20 to 50 percent below historical norms.