different metrics to measure the success or lack thereof in buying them we also learned that there is a wide array of types of services that the department of defense buys everything from car washing services to very is a huge variety of systems that are in place some good some bad some in different as we've discussed before the panels work program is the first to define metrics to measure the difference between the cost that we are paying and the value that we're getting which we've completed that part of our effort and then to move on to a series of hearings that are hypotheses really about what might explain the difference between the cost we're paying and the value that we're getting this morning our hypothesis essentially is that service contracts that have well defined objectives and that are carefully monitored provide much better value for the taxpayer than those who have neither of those characteristics so a service contract where the needs are very clearly spelled out the expectations are very clearly contracted and where there is in place an evaluative mechanism to protect the taxpayer and monitor the contractor results tend to be quite good in that the taxpayers get the value that we are seeking and we pay the cost or less than the cost that we have contracted for the other end of the spectrum are contracts where the requirements are ill defined or rushed through and where there is minimal oversight of the work that goes on the record tends to show that we do not receive sufficient value and we overpay for such  service so with that generic framework in mind we're going to look this morning at three examples of service contracts some of which have great strengths some which have great weaknesses and try to use those contracting experiences as a learning experience for the panel so that when we prepare our legislative recommendations to the full committee in the spring of two thousand and eleven we can draw from those experiences we're going to be looking at an air force contract in a navy contract in an army contract but that frankly is not meant to suggest that any of those branches has the corner on the market or on the good the bad or the indifferent fact that we've chosen what we think is  a very positive example from the navy doesn't mean that we imply that we think the navy does a better job in the other branches the more controversial one is in the realm of the army and conversely we don't think the army does a poor job we just happen to choose those contracts for purposes of exploration today obviously the contract that has drawn the most attention is the log cabin contract and that's the one that frankly is more rife with trouble the g a o found that that contract had  insufficient personnel to manage it the planning guidance was ignored there was a failure to define the stinnett ties which i don't actually think is a verb but the failure to define the task orders in a timely manner  requirements definition and contractor problems making management difficult the other end of the spectrum the navy contract when to look at this morning seems to have achieved high value and high efficiency and seems to be a role model for what we might want to do in the future but i do want to emphasize from the outset this is a very small sample a very large universe we do not by any means why that the positive example is characteristic of that branch or the negative examples characteristic of the other one we want to learn from these experiences and use that learning to make good recommendations to our colleagues on the full committee and in the house with that in mind i'm going to turn to my friend the ranking member from texas mr conway for his successful service sectors ition management requires attention to the organization ability to move from a fragmented manner of doing business to one that is more coordinated and strategically oriented wonderful phrase ology hard to get to primarily this involves changing all services are required terms of business processes organizational structures the roles and responsibilities in your submitted testimony one thing that stood out was the need for oversight management that the contract was after the spend too much time describing the rules we would simply ask you to summarize your written testimony in about a five minute or olson up says without objection folie extent of your written testimony is part of the record we've had a chance to read it the panel tries to maximize question and answer dialogue between the witnesses and the panel so we can learn more i'm going to begin by reading brief biographies of three witnesses and then we'll get to the statements and then we'll get to the questions from the members let's start with general brigadier general wendy c l o is that correct general very distinguished career she is the program executive officer for combat and mission support in the office of the assistant secretary of the air force for acquisition here in washington she leads the acquisition of air force services and is responsible for more than one hundred billion dollars existing and planned contracts across the air force she earned her bachelor of business administration degree in marketing from texas tech university in lubbock her master's from the air force institute of technology the right patterson air force base in ohio she's a distinguished graduate the squadron officer clusters the air force commendation medal the joint service medal with an oak leaf cluster the air force achievement medal in the global war on terrorism service medal gen general thank you for your years of service and vocation our country we're glad that you're with us  this morning i want to welcome back mr jeffrey parsons who is with us few months ago we're happy to have him with us again mr parsons is the executive director of the u s army contracting command a new major subordinate command the u s army material command a m c prior to assuming its current position mr parsons served as the director of contracting office of command contracting headquarters amc at fort belvoir virginia prior to his appointment to the senior executive service mr parsons was the director of contracting headquarters u s air force material command at right patterson air force base in ohio where he retired from active duty as an air force colonel after twenty six years of service mr parsons a graduate c he has the full authority and responsibility for one of the largest and most responsible procurement organizations in the federal government of the world for that matter his duties involve the obligation and expenditure of billions of dollars annually  he is a member of the senior executive service members of the serve in the key positions just below top presidential appointees he was born in lakewood new jersey an hour from where i live mr patterson and the important  recipient of the navy meritorious civilian service medal and numerous special awards thank you for your service to our country and welcome to the panel general we're going to begin with you ask if you would give us about a five minute synopsis and we'll go to questions  role is and what the promoters of of my responsibilities are their force program executive office for combat mission support of services acquisition was established in february of two thousand and two in response to the n two expectation that the services create a management structure for carolina services comparable to the structure retirement of of supplies my office provides a dedicated management structure for pre and post award service programs greater than or equal to one hundred million dollars currently we track one hundred seventy programs with a potential contract value of one hundred fifty billion dollars the scope of our program for leo is broad includes everything from base operating support to weapon information technology and advisory assistance service efforts that what makes us different from other p e o is that we work through at least seven different major command chains and contracting authorities with none of them reporting to me or my support units were not directly affiliated with any weapon system installation are specific warfighting mission and we have no budget input or control yet we own all the acquisition responsibility for services over one hundred million dollars worldwide and i have seventeen people on staff to help make that happen initially our office focused on acquisition strategy and contract structure for programs over one hundred million dollars leaving post award oversight to the owning organization the theory was that if we got the contract right then everything else would fall into place and the play word stage we started doing things like moving from time and material to from fixed price agreements or cost us six feet arrangements when it was possible we've weaned our teams for the most part off cost plus award fee contracts we shorten the length of our services contracts beefed up government program teams overseeing multiple ward id i q contracts we've also enticed so flag officers from various major commands to  send the service program oversight by offering delegation of acquisition authority and the delegation program has enabled our office now to reinstitute our post award reviews and these past award reviews we've made our biggest just at all where we think of service not as contracts that is program and as we look at things with programs that means we engage not just a contracting officer but we get our quality assurance representatives we get auditors we get our financial advisors and we get the commanders who own the mission being performed by the service provider at the table with us to talk about it during our annual post award reviews we examine contractors performance and also discuss the government team's execution oversized of their programs are responsible for here some of the things that we've learned in that process and some cases the teams responsible for the programs reviewing had never talked to each other until they prepared the briefing for our review some commanders were very frustrated with their contractors but didn't know how to get it fixed so they were just living with the problems some organizations had great web based quality assurance reporting tools to facilitate good tracking even in the worldwide environment so we're stealing those ideas to share across the air force just because we moved from a time in the tiriel contract to a cost plus sixty contract doesn't necessarily mean that teams manage that way we found that in some cases even with the cost plus the contract there's a tendency to still manage it as so it's a time in the tiriel effort adding more contractors to multiple award id i q contract isn't necessarily a good thing and we have challenges managing id i q ceilings and growth on individual task orders and those type of contracts to our contracts are not always living up to the commitments that they've made especially with regard to small business sub contracting but the bottom line as well can strike good as our contract might have been the success of the effort depends on the post award involvement and then multi functional government team and the preparedness of that team for the world famous play and conclusion laws and regulations will describe the continuum of th contracts that are available to us service actions often fall into a fixed price or the fixed price end of the spectrum but it takes discipline to get there and sometimes the requirement legitimately needs the flexibility a time in the tiriel cost reversible effort so rather than defining preferred contract types we've worked in the air force for more oversight in a multi functional role in the post war environment and we found that as we get the teams involved in the end they realized a benefit of their participation in the beginning as they defined as requirements and we actually began to see improve our source of actions in both the preamp or post award environment we've improved competition we're getting better prices with that greater discipline we've increased attention on our small business participation with that and we've begun to link our large dollar service acquisitions with air force strategic vision and enterprise solutions  a way we haven't been able to before i previously submitted my statement about the individual contracts german and concludes my statement by general thank you very much we appreciate mr parsons welcome back to the committee thank you chairman andrews congressman conway and distinguished members of the defense acquisition reform panel thank you for this opportunity to discuss the army's initiatives to improve service contracting the army is undertaking initiatives that enable our contracting mission to be agile expeditionary and responsive to our work fighters w fiscal stewardship of taxpayer dollars we used metrics to collect information about the program performance and contract execution and use that information to improve how we structure future contracts we use assumed broached to improve the acquisition strategy for recent wild agency components in support of joint combined coalition and multinational operations this includes operations other than war such as disaster relief peacekeeping or humanitarian assistance missions we're pleased to report that the army thr provided a quick reactions forward for operations worldwide including operations in very austere conditions the log cabin three contract was awarded on december fourteenth two thousand and one soon after nine eleven to kellogg brown and root services as a result of a competitive best value source election the contract is an indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contracts with one base year and nine option years when the army awarded log cat three there was no prediction that we would execute the level of requirements that we have experienced to date require misplaced a lot cat three contract to support the overseas contingency operations have dwarfed the combined efforts of all previous log cap contracts in the first four years of log cap three obligations exceeded previous efforts by all means three hundred fold and grew to over fourteen billion by october of two thousand and five these dramatic increases in the level of effort allowed kept recontract coupled with the challenges and problems every sold in from this rapid expansion made it clear to the army that it needed to develop and execute a new contract strategy to support the soldier the army carefully considered the lessons learned from log cap three execution and consulted with the department of defense sr services combat commands and industry is the new act in strategy was developed the primary objectives of the new log cabin or acquisition strategy were to reduce programmer risk increase capacity and incentivize contract performance after considering how best to achieve these objectives the army major changes in strategy and organization structure to provide better service delivery to the war fighter and value to the taxpayer or the examples of these improvements include the following the army now uses deputy program director station forward to support operations interact coase in afghanistan and support the execution of theater support contracting these individuals serve as the senior log cabin visor to the comba assisting in requirements planning and making providing cost management acquisition information as required secondly the army now has senior executives in charge of the wildcat program office and find writing office to ensure better communication and access with the warfighting commands the appointment of s e s is to these key positions demonstrates the army's commitment to ensuring that log cabin is properly managed these positions are now at the same relative level as those control in similar warfighting resources the army uses multiple ward indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contracts to eliminate a single point of failure having three log kept for contractors lessens the probability that contractors will become overwhelmed by increases in requirements reduce the risk of an errant in having one one contractor providing services when the army competed log cap three this risk did not appear to be excessively high when viewed in the context of the level of services requested under log  however he said mentioned before due to the tremendous increase in services required by the overseas contingency operations the army sixteen and command incorporated into law the cap for this mobile ward portfolio approach that mitigates the risk of any one of the three failing to perform should any contractor fail to perform any tasks for to reseize under the indefinite delivery indefinite quantity arrangement the other two contractors will service built in backstops to allow ongoing mission support the new business arrangement substantially reduces the risk of contractor nonperformance department offenses executing more control over log cabin quire misfired validation through a joint acquisition review board this board ensures consistency and support levels across operating locations and allows funds to be spent where they will provide the maximum benefit given current mission requirements the supporting units said the planners any organizations that define the requirements to meet the needs of the us forces in addition in an attempt to determine the proper use of log cap as a capability in future contingencies both in conus and abroad a quarters department in the army chief for recently established a log cabin two thousand and ten strategy general officer steering committee which includes army wide representatives as well as participants from the assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for program support and a j for from the joint chiefs of staff the purpose of this committee is to address key program issues  strategy for future wildcat utilization policy let me assure you that the army contracting command is committed to excellence in all contracting including these very complex and critical of camp contracts we continue to collect lessons learned and make improve i response of the wanting of all contracting also throughout the nasty plains states i have worked in the contracting fields the navy the last twenty eight years including multiple leadership positions at nav c responsible for caring of major weapons i also served as the program manager toward seaports did not provide as much opportunity for small business to compete as we desired because even though they had a third of the cons there only winning about ten percent of the business so we created forty in order to provide increase opportunity for small business and to expand the functional areas of those contracts address the needs our field activities and eventually the whole navy we expanded to twenty two functional areas of professional support services and engineering services and added the capability set requirements aside for services there are some of those but it's i would say it's ninety nine percent bonus the geographic zones help small businesses compete in the small areas they want across the country if they desired you'd want to take a small business that might among the diverse population of large and small business the c forty approach to acquiring services provides opportunities for many small companies their right brain to the navy diverse ideas and concepts this benefits the navy and encourages the rest of the nation small businesses benefit by being able to meet among other small businesses or on an unrestricted basis for navy work since the inception of seaport thousand and four forty seven percent of the approximately seven hundred taskbar as have been won by small business three billion dollars have been obligated to from i believe two thousand and five and one example that stuck struck me it's actually two thousand and four in long cap three the g a o report of the army directed a contractor the contractor in that case providing water  for units within a hundred kilometers of certain designated points but at least according to the g a o the statement of work did not indicate how much water needed to be delivered to each unit or how many units there were  very clear about that so we hear both sides but it strikes me that sometimes contractors get beat up for things that we don't do very well in the government and this is not a rhetorical question how could this happen how could we enter a contract that says we want to buy water and that we from our side didn't give direction to the contractor as to how much water and how many years it had to go to the whole nature of the original contract in vision where i believe it was about catering services that strikes me as so ellen mentally when someone higher than your pay grade i'm sure approved this contract the fact that he or she missed this is just dum stop how do we get to a point that we issue a contract with that little specificity of the nature of what that contract was originally designed for which was a very undefined requirements for initial operations if we were going to deliver water to the units within one hundred miles of post province who would be responsible for specifying the specifics of how much water for whom and when how would that work that would start with the units they have the re actual requirements and they would inform the wildcat team that same country exactly how much water they need to deliver to exact location and then the  ministry of contracting officers that are located in asking afghanistan would give direction to the lot of contractors but all starts with the units being able to define the requirements now one of the other criticisms in the g a o report was that there weren't enough contract officers oversight just in afghanistan i'd have to get back to you with the exact numbers but i think between countries we have about one hundred twenty personnel today are involved with log cabin management the breakdown between iraq and afghanistan i do not but i can get that for you  i have no frame of reference for that what how many people in country did we have in two thousand and four two thousand and five that was part of the problem we didn't have any early they really wanted two thousand and four a measure that would read avidly i realize that there are obviously it's a war zone there are some safety issues other issues but that's that's not an issue when did when did we first have personnel three and let me let me qualify means the defense contract management agency had been there from the start thousand and five wow so we actually had a situation where on the ground from march of zero three on with no contract officer until january of zero five why is that works if i communicated that it was inappropriate what we do what we had not done for a couple of years because our staff was very small and we were working direct relationships with each program that any contract that was going to exceed one hundred million dollars we got involved in defining the source election strategy helping making those decisions and because we had such a lean staff we weren't doing any of the past awards but in the past couple of years we started delegating some of our authority to some of the general officer and senior executive service members out in the major commands and getting them to help us provide better oversight with certain conditions and that has then relieved our office to go out and get more involved in the post award oversight role because that is part of our responsibility as well and really in in my mind that's one of the things we haven't done well we just haven't had the resources or dedicated much time to paying attention to what goes on in services acquisition historically my observation having grown up in the contracting community too many times are actual as our customers will have a need and they'll say ok contracting i need people to do maintenance for me over to you and then the contract gets put in place and people don't pay much attention to it and storch lee if there were some wrong with that particular contract or in an inspection or  and some type of inspection something went wrong or that contractor didn't perform well it was the contracting officer that got held accountable for that failure when the reality is that contractor is performing a commander's mission that commander's very mission success depends on the quality of that contractor and their performance which means when a quality assurance evaluator is assigned by that mission commander the theory is you would assign among your best to do that role historically we haven't done that very well so in this post toward environment we've put a lot of attention on how the government team is organizing who they're assigning to provide that oversight the mission commander even know what that contractor is or even understand the value of those contractors to the success of their mission and we're getting them increasingly and and if i could just give you an example i'm sure you've heard about vance air force base one of our training bases in the air force almost the entire installation is contracted and when we did one of our annual execution reviews with that particular wing commander he was involved in that post war discussion we had a lot of really good dialogue about what that contractor was doing and does he know what they're doing and how where and how well as his team managing that contractor to achieve the objectives they need to do and i could he lightbulbs coming on and in the time that he took over he went back and realigned performance plans for his civil servants who were responsible for overseeing the contractor he started holding his military leaders accountable for what those contractors were doing that actually prepared exercises that they tested what they would do if the contractor wasn't able or chose not to perform for some reason for example a strike  had run those exercises a couple of years a couple of weeks prior to the strike actually occurring that shut down mission training for three weeks and the good news is they had worked out all of those work around strategies they knew what they were going to need to do in order to keep mission going that's part of staying involved and when you have those dialogues you get involved now what i want to make sure we've just never thought that way before good or bad or indifferent we just traditionally as a culture haven't thought that way before so i had this dialogue to had this mentoring discussion to coach him on what it is they need to do and how to get involved has been just really productive and enlightening for many of the functional so that's how we've gotten solicitation to transition the work in a rack off a log cap three and a log cabin for a nice list station should be out on the street now in the next week or so with the anticipation that we'll do an award sometime in august in late august early september then that would  the chairman said that when you make this contract you don't think you're going to be there forever this long but there's an assumption that this contractor is a water expert i guess and they would therefore do the calculation that this soldier carrying this much equipment would need this many liters of water over the course of a day in this weather and that that's their job to figure that out we're going to give them the contract but that there needs to be that communication between them somebody needs to be checked in sa critical that we get it right and there's not a lot of leeway on on water you know when these guys are in the field or an outpost that can just call back and say i need five more skids and they're like that so i guess that's  and if you can the involvement there what's happening how involved and what the involvement of both have kept a log cabin in the draw down if you can explain that to us how your organizations are involved of provider part of our condition on taking that as having a point of contact responsible for defining that requirement and disciplined way and that's how ascap tasks are assigned in the beginning and assigned with a quality assurance evaluator in the beginning so that becomes a point of contact not only in defining a requirement but also in the post award evaluation process so ascap is posturing to support at iraq effort as is required clearly we are not at all the dominant player in that theater that are standing ready to support as required in terms of the long kept secular program director for the  program has been over to iraq frequently over the last sixteen months in working with them in the planning on the drawdown what they're working looking at is trying to establish where are the more enduring bases going to be located to have after the draw definitive things have been changing as far as you know where we're pulling troops out where we're going to still have troops stationed for the more enduring operations and so all that planning has been taking place it's being communicated and then it's folded into the it looks like in tell me whether what strikes you were moving it to anybody sir i'll go ahead and start from an air force perspective it's a little out of my line jobs are widespread as a contracting professional i can speak from that particular side of my background in the air force are enlisted troops have and our officers have a career path that ikeda dick contacting specifically from the very beginning swearing in as a basic training they will be contacting professional now on occasion we will cross flow other career into the contracting career field and then we'll put them through our traditional training that in the air force it's contracting both there are contracting skill sets for both unlisted officers it's probably one of the things that has contributed to our ability to support the cedar where the air force has represented seventy to eighty percent of the deployed contracting support capability for the entire department and i'll just add they mean obviously this was one of the topics of the cancer commission review that took place back in the fall of two thousand and seven and there was considerable discussion in that report the air force model for growing contracting professionals in the military and the army and the recommendations because what happens in the army years we do not cross over into contracting until there are what they call branch qualified which could take up to eight years so it's not unusual that people that were getting into  contracting on the army side had done seventy years as an industry officer or an army officer or maybe even the quartermaster before we bring them over based on the ganser commission recommendation we're looking to move that back because the cancer commission believes that there is some value to having contracting people who have operational experience and i can tell you being a product of the year force model i didn't have any operational time when i was a contracting person and if there is one the area where i wish i probably had had  names and so you know mass yellow said i think the air force is trying to cross some people over to give them some exposure to that i think you need to have some operational flavor to it but clearly we have to start the contracting individuals your earlier in your career field to get the type of expertise that we need and in fact up until two years ago we didn't even have an n c o designation for contracting like the air force and the air force's contingency crew the backbone is really on in two years and so the army is just responsibility is is that one of the problems that we have that there's so many people with their fingerprints on this the no one person seems to be responsible and that's maybe how we get contracts that are out a lot i mean do we have responsible that's part of it i think it's also it's also a cultural thing that often when a contractor steps into the role to do the job they're there can be a mindset of just kind of shutting down the brain that's a contractor sponsibility but that's a problem because it's the government's responsibility to make sure the contractor does what it is they need to do in fact it's the government responsibility to define the requirements and what's often challenging as we've relied on contractors that i find as we go in our press toward environment or even as we plan for follow on acquisitions certainly the dollar level that i'm dealing with sometimes is we've relied contractors to do that work for so long in some cases we're not even sure what they're still doing for us so we have to really spend a lot of time re baselining what our contractors are doing for us and that is in my opinion best handled by the people who mission the contractors being performed there are the people who understand what the contractor should be doing how and why and as the contract is really the tool for documenting that requirement somebody has to help us best to find that requirement it's usually the person who has a requirement and to be fair often they don't know how to do that but what we've done is put since we've been working with the university of tennessee in defense acquisition university to help develop some training programs to prepare those folks that we need to help us to find these requirements well to do that role and it's one of those things where you're really frustrated when you're asked to do send you don't know how to do it how frustrating it is to strike back so instead of just asking somebody to do and  a twenty five percent reduction in fixed labor rates producing a one hundred forty five million dollars increase in buying power in the final two years of contract could you elaborate for us how that worked and what the how that calculation was derive we worked with the defense contract audit agency and the contractor to get an understanding of where their costs were and what cost elements were involved as we extended the contract you know years when you when you extend your contract value you can say extend your contract you need to have cost insight in the sole source environment previously the rights were set in a competitive environment for the following we wanted some insight worked with the auditors we work with the contractor and came to the agreement of a twenty five percent reduction and what was the size of this contract what's the hundred forty five million dollars measured against about six it's about twenty five percent it was about six hundred million six to seven hundred million so it was very healthy so in other words the status quo would have spendings about six hundred million dollars but we got the same value for four hundred fifty five million dollars or something like that exactly sir we kind of looked at the other way we had a six hundred million dollars ceiling so we're really buying another one hundred forty five million dollars worth of work and in layperson's terms what would you attribute that success to what why were we able to achieve that level of success of working with the contractor and they're realizing that they had a mission to help us perform and they worked with us to get the data i'm sorry what exactly was the contractor doing that service the solutions for intelligence communications so the dia needed some id solutions we had a contract that was providing them and had been for a number of years and you were called in does manage that process when it was sole source world the air force had had that contract for a number of years and think that that does drive better value and lower cost but are there metrics by which we could measure that and could we should we fill in the blank that because you've had this success in creating more competition we saved x dollars or is there are equivalent yeah we want to be careful to understand that the diminishing savings may be a better function of better requirements then then actual savings we get that that we don't want to punish people for doing a good job on requirements is there a plan in place hate to do this but without prejudice as we say meeting that are not neither you nor nav see the help of this if you had to make an educated guess as to what that hundred dollars was reduced to what would that be again we will not hold you to this  for room for improvement but i don't i can personally tell you having been associated with program for five years we are not managing it like we did one five years ago when i came in and part of the reason i was not in my head with general mass yellow is i did have some  involvement with the development of her her office and it was that i brought that to the army and saying look we manage the service contract specially something like law cap we're in the billions of dollars some kind of program management structure in here to do this properly testimony in the written comments about about small business and some of the improvements and things we've done to increase that i had a lot of friends i hear from that would love to break into providing very good service on the slate and would love to get into some of the business can you talk about some of the efforts you've made and how they might break in to that that ever expanding web of government contracting i hear it every every week and when i go out how do i get into that system and say or they'll go on a web site look at this and then say that's not for me way too complicated which appears that to me to be a monopoly and wouldn't  about about trying to shirk responsibility and people that don't want to take the blame and i look at this and all three of you are people that have invited responsibility your whole lives in your whole careers and the kind of people that get stars on their shoulders and have these kind of careers i want to say i'll take that on knowing that someday i might get invited to a hearing like this and get the what beat out of you or a g a o report comes down you're responsible and i appreciate you i want to thank my colleagues in the witnesses for doing an excellent job as we expect i want to echo something mr ellsworth just said there's a news report yesterday that a prominent investment bank that that we used to own a piece of until they paid it back had record profits and the average salary if you divide their profits accordingly by the number of people have is over seven hundred thousand dollars a year and i do want to understand reflect the fact that we appreciate the sacrifice the three of you are making to manage a huge amounts of money and more importantly manage programs that are life and death in many cases for the people who wear the uniform of this country we appreciate the sacrifice that you make and how hard you work throughout your career the other the other thing that occurs to me and this is not a criticism of you it's more of an observation of us in this two hundred billion dollar a year enterprise where we're spending a huge amount of money in huge number of contract vehicles to buy everything from food supplies to software and again between we don't do a very good job of of gathering and analyzing data and again that's you're all busy actually doing the contracting i'm not criticizing you but we really don't have our arms around trends and data the way that we should and i think that's one things the congress is going to focus on to make sure that we have a better picture it strikes me that general massey ellos testimony is a success story because you got a grip on data in that trap that you made reference to it sounds to me like the first thing you did was get a sense of what had gone on in the past particular labor rates drill down on that an achiever very good result i'm sure there are other examples where the army in the navy is done same thing but i think we want to institutionalize  out there but we're all in this together and the taxpayers deserve really i completely agree with that this panel is not about grandstanding on problems that we can identify it's about trying to analyze and fix them