Commanders’ Wish List Makes for Wishful Thinking
June 2006 issue of National Defense - Commanders’ Wish List Makes for Wishful Thinking by Sandra Erwin.
Quote:
Part of the current gospel at the Defense Department is the notion that field commanders should have a say in procurement decisions.
Consistently, Pentagon officials have spoken about their desire to make the procurement bureaucracy more responsive to the needs of combatant commanders, and several independent studies and commissions have agreed this is a good idea.
Since the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the Pentagon’s equipment buys have fulfilled critical battlefield needs. But there are several areas where the Pentagon so far has failed to deliver. Most of these, according to senior officials, involve information technologies.
Combatant commanders cite network-centric operations, command-and-control, intelligence and surveillance as “problem areas” that require substantial improvements in technology...
As much as the Defense Department has successfully exploited the advances in the commercial IT sector and has deployed improved communications systems, programs frequently have been slowed by red tape and poor management...
