The U.S. Air Force Explains Its $1 Billion ECSS Bonfire

“We learn from failure, not from success!”

Well, if we apply Dracula author Bram Stoker's maxim to the U.S. Air Force, it could make the case that it has learned the most of all the U.S. military services.

A few weeks ago, the Air Force finally released the executive summary [pdf] of its investigation into its Expeditionary Combat Support System (ECSS). The system was a development blunder that the service mercifully terminated last year after spending US $1.03 billion over seven years and producing a system—if you can even call it that—without “any significant military capability.”   The  ECSS project  began in 2004 as an ambitious and risky effort to replace some 240 outdated Air Force computer systems with a single integrated enterprise resource planning  (ERP) system aimed at modernizing the service's global supply chain. It was also meant to help provide the core financial information required to meet a Congressional mandate that demanded an auditable set of books by 2017.

The investigation was demanded last December by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who wanted to know the root causes of what was “one of the most egregious examples of mismanagement in recent memory.” The Air Force only released the executive summary,  stamping the full document written by its Acquisition Incident Review (AIR) Team “For Official Use Only.” After reading through the summary, you can understand why: too many people would be at risk from having a heart attack either from anger, laughing themselves silly, or both simultaneously at the host of blunders highlighted.