Procurement - A Case Study

I don’t know how many of you have watched the NBC Nightly News the last few nights, but they’ve had an interesting investigative report that falls right into my recent acquisitions training at work. The U.S. Army has provided pretty much a textbook example of what suspicious acquisitions practice looks like.

Anyone that follows the news these days knows that there seem to be two main acronyms killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq: IEDs or improvised explosive devices and RPGs or rocket-propelled grenades. The Pentagon has been trying hard to find some sort of defense to counter the deadly simple results of enemies using RPGs to hit vehicles. Luckily, or so it would seem, an Israeli company has already created a system called TROPHY that mounts onto a vehicle and has a 90%+ success rate at shooting RPGs out of the air before they can do any significant damage. In Pentagon tests, the system shot 30 out of 30 RPGs right out of the sky.

Great news for keeping our soldiers safe, right? Well…not exactly. It turns out the Army had already awarded a contract to Raytheon to build an RPG defense system and they’re worried that purchasing a system that already works will put the ol’ kibosh on the $70 million Raytheon deal.

So why not support a U.S. company over a foreign entity? Raytheon’s system isn’t expected to be field ready until at least FY2011. Let’s see…working, yet foreign, system now or theoretical, Made in the USA product, five years from now? What’s the difference? Well, since about 170 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq have been killed by RPG since the fightin began, I’d guess the difference is about 300 dead people.

NBC did a little digging and found that Raytheon was essentially given the contract over all competitors without any actual proof that their theoretical system could even do the job. Not only that, the technical panel that the Army assembled to decide who to award the contract do was made up of almost 30% Raytheon employees. What conflict of interest?

I know that a four week acquisitions course doesn’t make me an expert, but this looks a little suspicious to me.