Many important issues confront President-elect Barack Obama's administration. In addition to the need to make the federal government more effective, accountable, open, and honest, the next administration faces numerous challenges at the Defense Department. An article recently published in IEEE Spectrum Online focuses attention on the problems with how DoD acquires its weapons--an issue that we have certainly addressed before here. Among the problems that the article identifies is politics trumping common sense: "congressmen, defense contractors, lobbyists, and economic development officials are all aggressive players in the weapons-acquisition process, all pushing for their own pet projects."
And it looks like Congress may be part of the problem again. This time the politicized project is the F-22, one of the case studies the IEEE Spectrum Online article uses to examine procurement problems--and also a project that POGO has criticized as being advanced too quickly as a result of politicization. The Hill reported on Monday that Reps. Ike Skelton (D-MO), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), and Jim Saxton (R-NJ) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates insisting that he spend the $140 million Congress appropriated to buy more F-22 Raptors. Secretary Gates has said that the F-22 is irrelevant to post-Cold War conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he wants to let the next administration decide on the future of the program.
As much as DoD is fairly criticized for being over-ambitious in its requests, the continued controversy over the F-22 Raptor demonstrates yet again that there are many people responsible for DoD's problems with weapons acquisitions, and that some of those people are members of Congress pushing the agency to acquire tools that they aren't even sure that they want.
-- Mandy Smithberger
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