Executive Director John Tierney wrote an op-ed in Newsweek on the need for greater oversight over the Sentinel missile’s budget overruns.
Increasing costs are common in many industries but pose an insidious challenge for military acquisitions. Should a construction project, for example, go over budget, it can be canceled. However, if a defense system runs into increased costs, its proponents will claim that failing to dump ever-increasing quantities of taxpayer dollars on the program puts national security at risk.
In our system, it should be the legislature that exercises oversight of the defense acquisition process and asks tough questions about whether inflated costs are worth sustaining. However, my former colleagues in Congress don’t ask uniform questions common in ascertaining the cause of cost overruns frequently enough, and instead are quick to rubber-stamp multi-billion-dollar programs without much oversight. Read more
