Defense Department Comptroller David L. Norquist, performing the duties of deputy secretary of defense, recognized acquisition personnel who saved DOD roughly $1.7 billion during the David Packard Excellence in Acquisition Awards ceremony at the Pentagon today.
Norquist provided some examples of their work:
— The Air Force’s Enhanced Polar System Team broke new ground in international space partnerships while mitigating the risk of a protected communications gap in the north polar region — enabling continuous, secure, jam-resistant strategic and tactical communications for warfighters, he said.
— The Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and the Electronic Warfare and Cyber Team put new electronic warfare capabilities into the hands of soldiers just one year after they were first envisioned — tools they are now using to protect their formations, detect and understand enemy activity in the electromagnetic spectrum, and disrupt adversaries through electronic attack effects, Norquist said.
— The Missile Defense Agency’s Space-based Kill Assessment Program Team provided the Ballistic Missile Defense System a battle damage assessment capability from space so that the United States and its allies can be protected from a ballistic missile attack on the homeland, he said.
— Special Operations Command’s Stand-Off Precision Guided Munitions Team fielded special operations capabilities that resulted in “game-changing lethality leaps for peculiar munitions” on a variety of manned and unmanned platforms and mitigated severe special operations forces and DOD-wide munitions shortages, Norquist said.
He noted that DOD manages 87 major defense acquisition programs worth $1.9 trillion, a scale unlike that of any other organization in the world. “And, that scale means that the improvements you make, even modest ones, make a big difference,” Norquist said. “For example, if you shave only 1 percent off a $2 billion program, you save $20 million — equivalent to the average annual taxes of roughly 2,000 people.”
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