Chair, I prefer to stay with the word “troubling”. I think, obviously, the committee will want to ask department officials why this occurred, who will provide their explanation of this.
I would go back, as I mentioned earlier, to the whole way these acquisitions are done. The strategy the government uses is the lowest-price compliant one. So there is a set of requirements that is put out, people bid, and then the government says, okay, we'll take the lowest price. We really question if this is an appropriate strategy when you're dealing with complex equipment and there is a recognition that there will be modifications over time. I think we recognize in this that the military itself may not have known all the modifications that were to occur, but they did know there would be modifications.
I think it would be very useful if the committee discussed how these kinds of acquisitions should go ahead. Should there be a more incremental approach as the requirements become better defined and the information becomes more accurate? It's clear in both of these projects that over time the requirements change significantly, and the costs, of course, change according to that, and yet there's a decision made at the very beginning to spend x dollars, a fixed amount. You really have to ask if that is the appropriate way to be doing this and to recognize up front that there is much more uncertainty and risk involved in these things than buying a truck. I think that's what the government really has to reconsider, and that's one of our recommendations. The government really has to reconsider, I think, the approach they use to do these acquisitions.