Larry Allen, founder and president of Allen Federal Business Partners, has said government acquisition officials should monitor spending on services in order to manage procurement processes in the federal government.

Allen wrote in a Federal News Radio article published Monday that federal acquisition leaders can begin their spending monitoring and procurement reform efforts through an “open dialog” with contractors that work to provide services to government agencies.

“Understanding how federal agencies are viewed as a service customer will likely lead to actionable information that can be used to start a process of service acquisition reform based on common sense,” Allen said.

“This in turn can lead to best practices, and perhaps eventually, procurement rules that are made for service buying so that product-based rules don’t have to be used on something for which they were never intended,” he added.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has said the Defense Department should tolerate risks through experimentation when it comes to the acquisition of new technology platforms, FCW reported Thursday.

“We’ve got to allow people to make mistakes,” Thornberry said at a committee hearing Thursday.

“One way to help with that is to be able to experiment and prototype so you that you see if something is going to work before you buy a bunch of them,” he added.

Sean Lyngaas writes Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), a ranking member of the House panel, discussed the issue of bureaucracy in DoD’s acquisition system during the hearing.

“What I’m most interested in is how we can more empower the individuals at the Pentagon to make those decisions with fewer layers of bureaucracy,” Smith said.

Rear Adm. Peter Fanta, director of surface warfare (N96) at the U.S. Navy, has said the service branch is working to analyze capability gaps to prepare for its procurement of the Future Surface Combatant slated for 2030.

He told Defense News reporter Christopher Cavas in an interview published Sunday that the production of Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and the replacement of coastal patrol boats are also in the pipeline of programs.

Fanta noted that the Navy will seek to both sustain existing capabilities and introduce new ones as it aims to match capability and capacity requirements to the threat environment.

“We look at future threats, at how those threats come together, what the build rates on the threats are, what we’re most likely to experience and then what do we expect the ship to do,” he said.

He added that budget shortfalls have impacted some planned programs, including modernization efforts for cruiser and amphibious ships and the acquisition of more surface-to-surface missiles for naval vessels.