Major General George Smith - 6: Issues Involved in the Serbian Deal

Transcription

1 Major General George Smith - 6: Issues Involved in the Serbian Deal Welcome to the Defense Acquisition University. This material is for non-profit educational use only. Speaker's views and opinions are not necessarily those of the Department of Defense or DAU. Justin Porto: Welcome to the ATNL Living Library. My name is Justin Porto. I'm a professor of program management in the program management and leadership directorate of the Capital Northeast Region of Defense Acquisition University. With me today is Major General George Smith, who will be discussing his experiences in Iraq from a management and leadership perspective. The Serbian deal. Talk a little bit about that, please? Maj. Gen. George Smith: Ah, sure. The Serbian deal was a good one. Like many of the things that bedeviled me when I was there, this one also had started before my arrival. And this does go to some cultural things. In the run-up to departure, the issue of corruption was mentioned, that we needed to be very sensitive to whether or not the deals that were being done were subject to some element of corruption. It wasn't clear how these things would go down, but historically, there were reasons to believe that people were making money, big money, from what had occurred previously. When I arrived, almost on my very first meeting with the boss, Gen. Dubik, he was anxious to get some pricing data for equipment that we could then offer in competition what had been known as the Serbian deal. The Iraqis were attempting to go to additional sources outside of the U.S. FMS process to acquire weapons, vehicles, uniforms, body armor, any number of things, because in addition to the FMS process using Iraqi money, we also spent a very substantial amount of U.S. money in providing arms and armament to the Iraqis. And so we were anxious to the extent that we could to have the Iraqis, when they were choosing to spend their money, spend their money with the U.S. And so they're a sovereign nation. We wanted them to be able to make the decision, "Do you go foreign source -- in this case Serbian -- or U.S.?" But this option could not be put on the table unless we had something. Exactly. 1

2 And so there was this great pressure to provide alternatives to the Serbian deal. This goes back to some of the tribal warfare. Well, the SAO and MNSTC-I had asked the U.S. CONUS base, "Please give us some options." That stuff never showed up, and now it's December, and we're heading towards Christmas and being more directive. The senior leadership at MNSTC-I was pounding on certain people, as they should, and then I found myself in the delicate position, stuck between understanding my boss' intent and the need to go forward and the people back here who were the ones who were pulling together the data to provide it to me. When most who were involved with this believed that this deal could never be done with the U.S., because the Iraqis had another whole dimension going. Now, was it they were getting the best economic deal, or was something going in somebody's pockets? And so our friends here in the U.S., who were undermanned, understaffed, as they reported, thought that spending the time and effort to put together the data to support the Serbian deal was a wild goose chase. General, I just want to bring up that to -- for those of you that's not familiar with the Middle East culture, what would be a very unethical scenario for us, especially in the military, would be considered almost normal culturally with this thing of taking care of people and making deals. Did you find that? Yeah. Although not sanctioned by them officially, it was just a way of doing business all the time. Uh-huh. So this was something additional that you were fighting literally or going against the grain when you're dealing with the folks on that type of level. Oh, absolutely. And it was a perception, because no one could prove it. It's not like this was "CSI: Baghdad," and we could go out and come up with -- "There you are. There's the forensic evidence." There's the forensic evidence. Yeah. We didn't have any of that. But it was only the concern that that might be the case that forced 2

3 us to move quickly. In any event, the whole business, the Serbian deal was one where the people in the U.S. for reasons that they could articulate were a little bit slower coming up with the data. When it finally came to us, they provided part of it, there were these 1,100-some-odd mortars that they fixated on. And so in the early going, not fully understanding everything my boss wanted, and because he was pounding on the table for the mortars, I got him the mortar data. But then when we got the mortar data, others, because in the frustration of getting it from the one source, the proper channels, we did what all Americans will do. We started looking for stuff everywhere, including googling it and stuff. And then we had competing sources of our own numbers, very different prices for the mortars that we had. And so that caused consternation inside of MNSTC-I. This is a great example of the tribe. The U.S. official tribe delivered one set of data. The hard charging SAO people going off on their own delivered a different set of data, different numbers. And then the boss himself was touching his sources, third set of data. What the hell's ground truth here? All of this -- of course, we only presented one set to the Iraqis. And then, after giving much blood over the mortars, I learned that well, there was a whole lot more to the Serbian deal. It wasn't just mortars. There were pistols. There were police uniforms. There were protective vests and things, IBA. And so Smith set out in hot pursuit of the rest of it. Oh, God. The rest of the stuff. The rest of the story. So I'm back on the phone with the U.S. "Okay. The mortars are okay. We didn't like the numbers you gave us, and we may use our own, but where's the rest of the darn stuff?" Okay. So these guys take a deep breath, and they try to explain to me, "This deal's never going to get done. Why are you wasting our time?" I said, "Yeah, but you know what? We have to present a full package for the whole Serbian deal. It's the optics. It's very important." And okay. Bingo. The people back here get busy on it. And then almost at the very end, the general becomes concerned about whether or not we've got everything there. 3

4 And so he leans on senior leadership over at the Iraqi ministry and says, "Give us the contract that we understand that is being negotiated with the Serbians so that we can be sure that we are being totally responsive to your requirements." Great approach. "Show us what you're asking the other people for, and we'll meet that." And then when that comes in, we get the document, and this is late March, early April. Of course, the document is in Arabic. So it takes three or four days, because it's this big, to interpret. I learn two shocking things. First, the Iraqis actually had the same document in English, but they weren't going to do us any favors. Get out. No. It says right in there that the Serbians provided this document in both Arabic and in English, and the crafty Iraqis give us the Arabic one. Wow. That was where they're crafty. Where they weren't quite so crafty is they failed to remove the signed pages from the contract. They had already signed the contract. I'm holding it. Done deal. Oh, my God. So we continue to press hard -- those were the good things. The bad part of all this was I also learned late in the game that in addition to this individual stuff, there was part of the deal, a separate -- the contract was in four or five parts. One of the parts was for the Lasca [ph] light attack aircraft. My heart sank. I had no idea that we were looking for the Lascas. Now, the boss knew that, because he was more involved from the beginning. But it wasn't until late March, early April where it's, "Well, where the heck is the Lasca stuff." And, "Oh, boy." Wow. "Let me try this one all over again." It was an example of persistence being frustrated by lack of clarity in the requirements. I lay the responsibility for this one right at my doorstep. 4

5 Had I thought this one through from day one, I would have gone in saying, "Gen. Dubik, give me 15 minutes and tell me everything you know about this." But I was so focused on taking that next hill, I didn't ask about the bigger picture. Again, bring this back into an acquisition perspective, what we're taught and what we teach at DAU is to get it writing. Get the -- in a sense, Gen. Dubik, the three-star commander of MNSTC-I was the user, and to get that -- of course, you don't ask a three-star general to give me something in writing. Well, you do if you're a two-star. You can do that. Yes. You're right. That's true. Yeah. But that might've been some of it, and again, it's tough. But that is what every acquisition professional faces, especially in a program management office. Gen. Smith, I want to thank you for coming here today and giving your insights, your experiences; your interesting stories. And I really think this will be out as a webcast, and ultimately, a lot of people will be able to benefit from seeing these insights. And we'd invite you back at another time to maybe go on to a different area, because there's so much we could talk about, and then as the J-5, now, and strategic initiative planning, which is your current job at the Pentagon, I could see that this would help you quite a bit in that capacity, also. Yeah. So again, thank you, sir. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. It was great. It was great. Thank you. 5

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