Integrity of Our Defense Acquisition System Allows Our Warfighters to Win the Nation's Battles

The overarching principle of our defense acquisition system is that it exists to provide the best weapons and best equipment for our warfighters to win our nation’s battles. The constant innovation allowing domination of our potential foes demands that we leverage the most advanced technologies developed by our world-class American industry. As our society continues its headlong rush into the digital age, one of the greatest challenges is for the Department of Defense to leverage Silicon Valley’s global leading-edge technologies.

However, nothing is more important than maintaining the integrity of the acquisition process itself. World-class technological outcomes for our warfighters cannot be achieved unless competition itself is privileged. On the contrary, the process of selecting the best product for our warfighters is crippled when competition is undermined by at best manipulation and at worst corruption.

Although the OIG Report is hardly dispositive, it is noteworthy as much for what it fails to address as much as for what it does address.

On the one hand, the Report identifies a number of unusual coincidental relationships between DoD officials and corporate representatives participating in the process. On the other hand, these coincidences are often minimized, and albeit referred to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA), they declined, and no one was prosecuted. The Report itself dismisses some of the most serious conflicts of interest as mere coincidence. Indeed, a salient feature of the DoD OIG report is its whitewash of the numerous violations of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) and DoD policies.

For example, individuals with direct and substantiated relationships with Amazon Web Services (AWS) are littered across the JEDI landscape. Indeed, prior to accepting high-level positions at DoD, some had clear and sustained relationships with AWS. For example, Sally Donnelly, who accepted a position at DoD as a special advisor to then Secretary of Defense James Mattis, had AWS as a client. The same holds true for her friend and former employee, Anthony DeMartino, who served as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary. And of course, there is Deap Ubhi, a former Amazon employee who was dealing with JEDI at DoD after having accepted a position at Amazon.

I note with interest that these facts did not really trouble the DoD OIG. Based on its analysis, someone can be a highly paid consultant or employee one day and promote their previous client or employer the next because they allegedly are not involved in the “technical” aspects of a proposal.

Another point of interest relates to the sale of Ms. Donnelly’s firm, SBD Advisors. While holding her position as a high-level DoD official, Ms. Donnelly received three payments of almost $400,000 each from an Andre Pienaar. At the time, Pienaar was a commercial partner of Amazon and had a personal and professional relationship with Amazon’s head of worldwide public sector sales. Unfortunately, this fact is neither addressed nor explained in the Report.  

Also interesting is that Ms. Donnelly did not disclose these payments to the public until months after her departure from government service.

More disturbing, the core flaw of the process — the pre-determination of a down-select to a single contractor — is never challenged in the OIG Report. In fact, the report overlooks that the articulation of the RFP gating requirements was designed to down-select to one provider, specifying only metrics that could be met by that single provider.

Indeed, at no point in the Report are threats to the competitive process addressed comprehensively. In other words, the critical ingredient of competition is essentially viewed as a necessary casualty of this unique and lucrative contract award by justifying the pre-selection of a single contractor. On the contrary, at no point does the Report identify competition itself as the casualty, much less elucidate the threats.

Our defense industrial base's vitality and technological prowess has always been the catalyst of our military might. Clearly, DoD must adjust its acquisition policies to work more effectively with industry or risk industry leaders opting for more promising markets. However, if industry views the DoD acquisition process as essentially corrupt, industry will adjust its desired outcome from developing better solutions for defense problems to achieving profits through graft and corruption. Conversely, seen from the government acquisition perspective in the JEDI award’s case, the goal of the bidding process is to draft the RFP metrics to steer the award to a pre-selected provider rather than how to acquire agile, effective cloud services for the warfighter.

DoD must field advanced technologies; failure is not an option. We simply cannot afford to privilege corruption of the defense acquisition process over the competition essential to developing the best weapons and equipment for our warfighters.

John Adams, BG, USA (Ret.), spent 30 years in the Army as an aviator, intelligence officer and foreign military attaché. On September 11, 2001, he was stationed at the Pentagon as Deputy Director for European Policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and participated in immediate disaster recovery operations at the crash site as well as coordinated international support for the US diplomatic and military response.