Podcast: Getting weapons into production with USD A&S Bill LaPlante

The Undersecretary for Acquisition & Sustainment (USD A&S) Bill LaPlante joined us at the 2022 Conference hosted by George Mason University and Defense Acquisition University. He was on fire and dropped a ton of amazing insights, so I had to republish the audio to the Acquisition Talk podcast. I’ll link to the video when it’s up, but you’ll get to listen to it here first. Bill LaPlante touches a number of important areas. The outline of the discussion is below.

That’s a long outline because there was so much of interest!!! I’ll give one story LaPlante related at length because he used it to show why PPBE reform is so critical:

We have a situation — I won’t name the program — where the cost estimate was done for the program (because it had to be done) before the acquisition strategy was fully developed. We’ve updated the acquisition strategy to be better. I updated it last week.

Then they came back to me and they said, ‘The problem is, sir, you put the acquisition strategy together, you moved this. They don’t have the money sequence that way to do it.’ I said, ‘Okay, we’ll ask them to change it.’ ‘It’s too late. Got to wait until next budget cycle.’ I go, ‘How did they put the money in the program? How did they program it?’

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