House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter maintains that the Pentagon has a penchant for “increasingly expensive” platforms and ultimately does not “deploy these more expensive systems in sufficient numbers to sustain operational needs.” He wants to change that. In presenting his committee’s version of the 2007 defense authorization bill, Hunter declared, “This committee will insure that we are making the right tradeoffs between cost, new technology, and deployable numbers.” Hunter has been a chief critic of what he calls “budget-driven” Pentagon assessments of operational needs.
A new report from the Government Accountability Office calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer to have budget certification authority over the military services’ research and development accounts—a move the services say would add a burdensome and unnecessary layer of bureaucracy.
