In 1998, very shortly after I arrived at the Pentagon, I received a call from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the audit and investigative arm of the Congress. The GAO had just begun to take a serious look at the Coast Guard’s planned “Deepwater” acquisition program and had one simple question: Did I, and my team at DOD, believe the Coast Guard had the capacity and capability to execute such a large, complex program? My response was intentionally vague. Not only did I not think it appropriate for us to pass judgment on another agency’s program, but the factors that would drive success or failure were many and varied. Clearly it was a highly complicated program and one that far exceeded anything the Coast Guard had done before. But with the right people, the right strategy, and the right kind of partnership, success was nonetheless attainable.

But it was not to be. And in this volume, Professors Brown, Potoski, and Van Slyke effectively chronicle the downfall of a highly visible, expensive and multifaceted program. In so doing, they also highlight a chronic weakness in federal acquisition: our tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water, rather than use program failures as sources of learning for future activities. Indeed, as the authors show, the failure of Deepwater, while not isolated, had far-reaching repercussions across the federal acquisition landscape, one of which was the effective death knell of the lead systems integrator (LSI) acquisition strategy.