Posted on 05/06/2005 5:29:09 AM PDT by OESY
The U.S. military is the toughest and most professional in the world, but one force it usually can't beat is the bureaucracy back in Washington. The Defense Department has 200,000 acquisition personnel, whose insistence on doing everything "by the numbers" slows to a crawl efforts to get vital equipment such as armor into the field.
But the bureaucracy can be defeated, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld demonstrated last week when he invoked his new "Rapid Acquisition Authority," allowing him to cut through the red tape to meet urgent battlefield needs. By invoking this power, Mr. Rumsfeld has given the Secretary of the Army 15 days to find a way to mass produce a new device that can jam the electronic signals insurgents use to detonate improvised explosive devices in Iraq.
The portable jammer, developed by the Navy, saves lives by stopping bombs from going off. It costs less than $1,000 each. But when estimates came in that it would take 13 months to field under the normal acquisition procedures, it became clear it was time to take Rapid Acquisition Authority out for a test drive. Now the jammers could be on their way to Iraq in a matter of weeks.
The Pentagon's sorry procurement system is a creation of Congress, which barely could bring itself to pass Rapid Acquisition Authority last year. (Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter did yeoman service to get it passed, but House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was so conflicted she abstained.) It currently is limited to just $100 million in spending, a fraction of the $75 billion defense procurement budget. The small victory on jammers is a good reason to expand this kind of efficient procurement to more military spending.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What other Dem's are you fond of?
Pelosi swoons again, "I love Donald Rumsfeld."
Who needs IED jammers? What is needed are remote IED triggers, to force IEDs to do off at safe distance ahead of a moving convoy, and hopefully to take a few bad types in the process. Once IED has exploded, it's all with it, but a [temporarily] jammed IED is still dangerous.
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