Political Quotes

“There are a lot of ideas. No. 1, our biggest problem is when we buy, we don't know what we want. So don't even start a proposal until we truly know what we want. That is No. 1. No. 2 is there has to be capital at risk by the person building the ship or building the airplane. The only way to incentivize the private industry to control cost is to make sure half the cost is coming out of their hide. If we do that, what will happen is we will see real cost control because they don't do it on the commercial side. They only do it on the military side. The third thing is having a grownup in the room when we decide to make modifications. The fact is, when we think we have an unlimited budget, nobody is there to say: You don't have an unlimited budget. You can't add this. It may be nice. There is a great story on that. It was an Army backpack helicopter developed by Honeywell--on time, on price. Here is Honeywell delivering what the Army wanted on time and on price, and the military buyers added bells and whistles. It ended up weighing 12 pounds more, tripling the cost, and delaying the onset, to where they finally cancelled it-- not because the supplier didn't supply it on time and on price, but the military was out of control in terms of what they were asking for. So they didn't get it. So we didn't have the availability to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to look behind walls, which was available and on time. But it was our purchasing system.…”