Navy adds 1,900 acquisition staff in 6 months - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Navy adds 1,900 acquisition staff in 6 months

SAN DIEGO — The shift inside the department to insource more acquisition jobs is a positive step, the Navy’s No. 2 civilian official said.

The push for more insourcing of procurement tasks “is the right way to go,” Navy undersecretary Robert Work told reporters on the sidelines of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association conference here. “Quite frankly, the Department of the Navy lost its technical authority in the ’90s. We lost too many professionals and we didn’t have a disciplined requirements process. It became more a thing where you could hang as many requirements on a specific ship as you wanted rather than a disciplined process” involving trade-offs in requirements.

“We lost the ability to tell when our programs were really in trouble, because we didn’t have the right [amount] of oversight,” he said. “We lost the expertise to say, ‘We’re now in trouble. How do we fix it?’ We’re looking at all of our contracts. We’re making sure with the award fees we don’t award people just for being there. They have to perform,” he said. “We’re making decisions, like on the LCS [Littoral Combat Ship] where we bite the bullet. Let’s go to one [design]. Let’s write the RfP, [and] hope people will not be able to challenge, and we’ll get us the ship we want.

“We’ve made it very clear to all of the major shipbuilders that we will be willing to compete any ship, at any time, if it’s possible to get a second competing yard,” he said.

“We’ve hired 1,900 acquisition people in the last six months,” Work said. “We’re trying to rebuild the expertise in the Department of the Navy. Are we where we need to be? No. It’s going to take a five-year process to get all of the acquisition professionals we want.”

Echoing recent congressional testimony by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Work said the U.S. defense budget will have to grow at 2 percent to 3 percent in real dollars after 2016 for the military to maintain the fleet it needs.

“The Department of the Navy did really well with 1 percent real growth” in its funding in the proposed fiscal 2011 budget, Work said. “As the secretary of defense has said, we really need 2 to 3 percent real growth to keep the force structure we have” to handle missions ranging from humanitarian assistance to supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I think he knows it’s going to be a heck of a fight to get that level of resources over time as we turn our attention to deficit reduction,” Work said. “Every year, we’re probably going to have to readjust our appetite and see what we get from Congress. But Congress and the president have both been pretty forthcoming up to this point.”

In the Quadrennial Defense Review, Gates has laid out six focus areas for the Navy, such as counterinsurgency and building partner relationships, Work said.

“He said you have to be able to do better in these six things, but you have to maintain a sea-based nuclear deterrent and you cannot lose your dominance in conventional war-fighting,” Work said.

“So it’s an expansive mission list. And if you look at the budget right now across the Department of Defense, about 50 percent of everything we buy is really focused on conventional high-end war-fighting,” he said. “Forty percent are things that can go either way — tankers, Predators, Global Hawks, stuff that can go across. And only about 10 percent of the budget” is for irregular warfare.

“The bottom line is, the [irregular warfare] stuff doesn’t cost a lot,” Work said. “You can buy a riverine [naval boat] squadron for a lot cheaper than you can buy a DDG-51 [destroyer]. … If you look at the increasing capacity for irregular warfare that we’ve had since 2006, it’s very, very impressive.”

But the fight for budget dollars will get tougher in future years as the U.S. government turns its attention to deficit reduction, Work said. The worst-case scenario is that that could change the nature of the Navy fleet, but that’s at least a far-off possibility.

As funding gets tougher and if it drops significantly, “at some point, you’ve got to say I do need a deployable, regional Navy” that is cheaper to operate than “a truly global Navy that operates globally and collapses when necessary,” Work said.

“The whole competitive dynamic in the naval competition for the last 100 years has been based on a dominant Navy, a global Navy,” he said. “And if we lose that … then regional powers could actually start to say, ‘OK, I’ll take you out. I’ll actually get into a competition with you.’ We don’t want to do that, so I think the debate will be, at what point do you have to say we just can’t keep a global Navy? We’re not there yet.”

Overall, the Navy is happy with the results of the QDR, Work said.

“Not only did we do well in shipbuilding, but we did really, really well in aviation. So looking across the whole department on the QDR, obviously, did we get everything we wanted? No,” he said.

But, he added, “We’re extremely pleased. ... Overall, I’m pretty bullish on the way this came out.”