After a few years’ lull on Capitol Hill, it’s time again for Defense acquisition reform. And this time around, reform might not be a strong enough word. The backers, the leaders of the House Armed Services Committee say they’re aiming for a wholesale replacement of the DoD acquisition system. The goal is mainly speed, but also a more empowered acquisition workforce, a willingness to fail fast, and a more diversified defense industrial base.
Reps. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and Adam Smith (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairman and ranking Democrat, say the SPEED Act is meant to be the first of several upcoming overhauls to the Defense acquisition system. And unlike previous waves of reform, it’s less focused on the minutiae of process than on the structure of the overall system. Because in the authors’ view, an obsession with process — both in DoD and on Capitol Hill — is exactly the problem.
“They’ve just got to understand that we’re not looking for a no-risk situation, and that’s going to require us to change too,” Rogers said at a forum organized by the Hudson Institute. “Congress can’t be pouncing every time they try something and fail. Failure can be and is a way to learn, but we want to incentivize that, which is why we’re empowering acquisition professionals. Most people want responsibility and the power to do things and make things happen and be rewarded for it, and we think this system sets that up, and we’re trying to send a signal that we’re going to not reward people who are risk averse and are trying to be bureaucratic in their processes.”
Under the SPEED Act’s revised structure, senior Defense officials would be responsible for determining whether there’s a valid requirement for a new system under a streamlined process. But once that decision is made, more discretion would flow to lower levels of the acquisition chain of command. The bill would formally define the role of program executive officers in statute and give them explicit authority over the planning, budgets and management of the programs in their portfolios, with three clearly defined goals in law: delivering military capabilities expeditiously, doing it cost effectively, and integrating emerging technologies into their programs.
“I think the federal workforce is incredibly capable, we’ve just set up a system of rules that make it impossible for them to do their jobs,” Smith said. “We’re not empowering them to use their talent to get to an outcome. Some people are better at things than others, so we need to make those types of judgments and pick people who are good. But I think in a lot of cases, you’ve got people who could be so much better if you would just empower them.”
Another major change would be an overhaul of DoD’s requirements process, which the backers say is a major bottleneck in what’s often called the “big A” acquisition system.
A recent Hudson Institute study found it currently takes more than 800 days for a military requirement to get analyzed, documented and validated by the detailed work of the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System. The bill would replace the Joint Requirements Oversight Council that oversees JCIDS and change its role from detailed documentation to identifying threats and assessing technologies. That council would have 30 to 60 days to do its work before passing the requirement off to a new organization called the Requirements, Acquisition and Programming Integration Directorate (RAPID), which would have just another 90 days to send a final approval recommendation to the deputy secretary of Defense.
Rogers said streamlining that requirements structure is essential to getting DoD focused more on outcomes than on process.
“We don’t want them to have to follow a preset requirements package that is not focused on a particular problem, we want to get after the problem,” he said. “One of the things that’s that spurred our focus is companies like Anduril, which said to the DoD, ‘Tell us a problem that you want gotten after,’ and then they went and spent their money on research and development to come up with a solution. Once we do an RFP and we get a potential solution that, let’s say, is 75% of an answer, we need to award that bid. Maybe change it just a little bit at the beginning to try to get it to an 80% solution, but then buy it. And if we want to work on the other 20% of the problem, we can do that in a second request. If we do that and do it quickly, it will bring a feeding frenzy to the department.”
Several other sections of the bill are aimed more directly at creating that “feeding frenzy” by making it easier for nontraditional firms to do business with DoD. Among other things, the legislation would make it easier for the department to use other transaction agreements instead of traditional contracts for large projects, create a new program to help companies bridge their technologies across the “valley of death” and into Defense programs, and create a new “as a service” model for DoD to buy companies’ data and other intellectual property for use in military systems.
Smith said the industrial base changes would build on the success of organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit.
“DIU has been very successful in the sense that we have given a place for people with innovative technologies to go get some money and R&D, but where it has run into trouble is when we decide we like something, and then it takes two to three years before we buy it,” he said. “So one thing it does is it brings DIU and the procurement process closer together, so that they are empowered to make quick decisions. Once they develop that technology, they can buy it. If you’re in this business, the best answer is yes. The second best answer is no. The worst answer is maybe.”
Rogers and Smith said they intend make the SPEED Act a major focus of this year’s House version of the Defense authorization bill and already found areas of agreement with their counterparts in the Senate.
But Rogers emphasized that this is only the beginning of a broader push to expand the defense industrial base.
“This is going to be an evolutionary process. This is not a one off,” he said. “After what we’re doing this year, next year we’ll layer on some more things that we think are necessary, that will, for example, help take a mid-size contractor and help them grow to a larger contractor. But we cannot meet the challenges that we face as a nation from a defense standpoint with our current defense industrial base.”
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