Abstract:
This case tells the story of the Army Development and Employment Agency, established by the army chief of staff in the early 1980s to procure quickly and efficiently relatively small items which could be of great use to troops in the field--without using established procurement procedures. Over time, however, ADEA, as a small, maverick agency, conflicts with the established army procurement bureaucracy over issues such as testing and purchase of "off-the-shelf" products and is, ultimately, eliminated. The case implicitly asks one to consider the reasons for the rules which ADEA challenges and to ponder whether an upstart, parallel agency was the best way to deal with perceived inefficiency.
