Complexity in an Unexpected Place: Quantities in Selected Acquisition Reports
https://www.dau.edu
Because 10 U.S.C. § 2432 (Selected Acquisition Reports, 2019), which has long been in efect, requires the SAR and the concurrent PB to agree on costs and quantities, this is clearly an accident. An ongoing mismatch also exists between the SAR and PB with regard to the past quantity produced. In the SAR, every past unit produced is counted, regardless of whether itwas a SLEPunit or a newbuild. In the PB, in the early years of the program, no top-level quantities were reported, presumably on the basis that upgrades to CH47F confgurationwere collectively just one of many ongoing upgrades in the Army’s helicopter feet. Typically, programs that perform multiple types of upgrade, but are not applying all of them to every legacy platform, report the number of each type of upgrade performed separately. They do not typically roll these up into a total quantity for the program’s LIN, because the individual upgrades are not comparable, and the number of platforms modifed does not match the total number of any one type of modifcation. When the decisionwasmade to buildCH-47Fhelicopters as newbuilds, cost analysts began reporting a total quantity of units at the line item level and chose to include both SLEP and new-build units in this total. However, they never looked back to include previously produced SLEP units in the Prior Quantity total. As a result, each newSAR and PB submission disagree, both on how many helicopters have been procured and on how many will have been procured in total when the program is fnished. Suggested Adjustments to Reporting One possible response to the issues described previously is to tell PMs never to change what they are buying: once the baseline is set and the pro- gram is approved, the plan should be followed and the systems should not change. This assumption is implicit in the data reporting process. And yet, this has never been government practice and we do not recommend that it be adopted. Our military goes to great lengths to provide our warfghters with the best possible equipment, andwe should not forbid that just tomake bookkeeping easier. We do ofer somemodest proposals that couldmake the reported data more useful, but frst we need to be careful about incentives. Data and Incentives Data recording systems provide incentives, sometimes in unexpected ways. “You get what you pay for” is a familiar adage. In 2007, Dr. H. Thomas Johnson wrote: “Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you get” (Johnson, 2007). If the acquisition sys- tem’s data requirements are not alignedwith the system’s goals, suboptimal
42
Defense ARJ, January 2020, Vol. 27No. 1 : 28-59
Made with FlippingBook Learn more on our blog