Milspec Reform

The Department of Defense is engaged in radical reform of the way it conducts its acquisition business. Declining requirements and budgets are resulting in fewer purchases of defense-unique products. Between 1985 and 1996, defense procurement accounts fell from over $100 billion to $43 billion. In addition, the defense industry has undergone profound changes with companies restructuring, consolidating, diversifying, or leaving the industry entirely. To meet defense needs, the Department can no longer afford to rely solely or primarily on defense-unique capabilities. Our acquisition reform efforts are not just a noble endeavor. These efforts must succeed to ensure that we have the industrial and technological capabilities to meet current and projected national security requirements.

"Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense."

Professional publication of the RD & A community.

This documented briefing examines both the acceptance and progress of current acquisition reform efforts and the factors affecting the support for these efforts within the Army's acquisition work force.

Recent efforts to "reinvent" government have extended to the acquisition system of the Department of Defense (DoD). In 1994, then Secretary of Defense William Perry directed the military services (Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps) to begin the process of reinventing their acquisition systems and policies. An important element of the "Perry Initiatives" was the elimination of all military specifications (milspecs) and standards from use in military acquisition. Traditional milspecs and standards were to be replaced with performance-based specifications. The Department of the Army (Army) took the lead in implementing the new policy, directing its employees to discontinue using all milspecs and standards. By late 1994, however, Army leadership found resistance to this policy from within the acquisition work force. Although the directive appeared clear-eliminate all milspecs and standards from use-Army leadership noted that milspecs and standards were still finding their way into requests for proposals (RFPs) and statements of work (SOWs) at the core of the acquisition process. Having adopted the initiatives and seeking to implement them fully, Army leadership was interested in learning why the rank and file of the acquisition work force was not embracing the reforms. In addition, the Army was interested in identifying ways to "incentivize" or improve implementation of milspec and standard reform.

A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publication This is a hopeful account of the potential for organizational change and improvement within government. Despite the mantra that "people resist change," it is possible to effect meaningful reform in a large bureaucracy. In Unleashing Change, public management expert Steven Kelman presents a blueprint for accomplishing such improvements, based on his experience orchestrating procurement reform in the 1990s. Kelman's focuses on making change happen on the front lines, not just getting it announced by senior policymakers. He argues that frequently there will be a constituency for change within government organizations. The role for leaders is not to force change on the unwilling but to unleash the willing, and to persist long enough for the change to become institutionalized. Drawing on the author's own personal experience and extensive research among frontline civil servants, as well as literature in organization theory and psychology, Unleashing Change presents an approach for improving agency performance from soup to nuts—mixing theory with practice. Its analysis is innovative and empirically rich. Kelman's conclusions challenge conventional notions about achieving reform in large organizations and mark a major advance in theories of organizational change. His lessons will be of interest not only to scholars interested in improving the performance of the public sector, but for anyone struggling to manage a large organization. "Steve Kelman's creative research, augmented by his own considerable experience as a reform-minded federal official, gives this book unusual depth and authenticity."—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School, author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End

Transforming Organizations provides in-depth case studies of outstanding government executives who dramatically changed both the performance and management of their organizations. The book includes case studies of Dan Goldin of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Ken Kizer of the Veterans Health Administration, James Lee Witt of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and four high-ranking government officials who changed procurement in the Department of Defense. In addition, the book includes interviews with NASA Administrator Goldin and FEMA's Director Witt. The volume also includes an essay by Ken Kizer on his experience transforming the Veterans Health Administration. From these case studies, Mark A. Abramson and Paul R. Lawrence develop eight lessons that all executives can learn from in transforming their organization: select the right person, involve key players, engage employees, and persevere.