DOD acquisition reform 2025

[joshjosh]

Leaked memo discusses:

• Prioritize speed over cost and schedule
• Eliminate "bureaucracy"
• Move from PEOs to Portfolio Acquisition Executives overseeing multiple related capabilities with authority to move funds around within the portfolio
• Use OTAs more often
• Continue emphasizing MOSA
• Pay for additional redundancies and continuous competition
• Incentivize private investment into the industrial base via demand signals

Draft memo reveals potentially sweeping Pentagon acquisition reforms - Breaking Defense

Breaking Defense obtained the draft memo just days before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is set to address a crowd of defense CEOs and top military acquisition officials on Friday, where he is expected to announce significant changes to how the Pentagon buys weapons.

breakingdefense.com

 

[helmutkohl]

As some one from the "inside".
a lot of this already ongoing. There's a strong focus on trying to get things done by getting rid of several processes to speed up delivery.
Most of our command is on board bypassing the "traditional" method to project management, acquisitions, etc.
The downside is that there are risks as well. Many of those "obstacles" were put in place to mitigate something that happened in the past, so removing them creates the risks that may appear later.

While America's military acquisition processes has been problematic and slow..
a lot of us don't necessarily agree that giving the private sector further control and autonomy is the solution either, as seen with Lockheed Martin given the drivers key with much limited oversight compared to other companies in the past, only to frequently run into issues. There's a good reason why both the Air Force and Navy are focusing on Boeing, and Northrop Grumman for their next aircraft.

 

[tychosis]

Honestly, as an employee of one of the primes I can tell you that a lot of these problems lie with the cognizant program offices. In my 20 years I've seen lots of initiatives to improve things--but quite frankly, most program offices are inept and do not have a fundamental understanding of how these systems and platforms even work and you can't effectively manage a program without understanding these engineering fundamentals.

I'm not entirely certain what trimming "bureaucracy" is going to do though--it's the overwhelming majority of what the government program office does.

(I agree with helmutkohl though, you can't entirely remove these guardrails either--they exist for a reason.)

I've led multiple development and integration initiatives for tech refreshing our systems, and I've been asked many, many times what we can do to improve things. My answer is generally some variation of "we need people to get good" but apparently that answer isn't sufficient because it's usually followed by "um okay what else" as though it isn't an option...

 

[aim9xray]

Leaked memo discusses:

• Prioritize speed over cost and schedule

Really? Did they really say that? Guess they did.

 

[TomS]

Really? Did they really say that? Guess they did.

Speed over schedule? Did AI write this?

 

[joshjosh]

Speed over schedule? Did AI write this?

Yes, correct, I am AI. I had meant to say "schedule over cost and performance." You can't prioritize speed without deprioritizing one or both of the other.

And from the article:

“What it does not acknowledge is that there’s always an inherent trade off between cost, schedule and performance,” he said. “He’s [Hegseth is] saying, of those three, I want to prioritize speed. What he’s not saying is, ‘I’m willing to accept higher costs and lower performance.’ But that is the reality, that when you prioritize one, you’re making sacrifices in one or both of the others.”

 

[TomS]

Yes, correct, I am AI. I had meant to say "schedule over cost and performance." You can't prioritize speed without deprioritizing one or both of the other.

And from the article:

Ah, sorry, didn't realize that was your rewrite. No offense intended.

 

[joshjosh]

Ah, sorry, didn't realize that was your rewrite. No offense intended.

No worries

 

[donnage99]

The military needs to own the IPs and able to grant appropriate IP to different entities to speed up development. There are guys that spent entire half of their career rebuilding their own invention in a different way because they did it while on the clock at another company.

 

[tychosis]

The military needs to own the IPs and able to grant appropriate IP to different entities to speed up development. There are guys that spent entire half of their career rebuilding their own invention in a different way because they did it while on the clock at another company.

It isn't that easy. Nearly every invention in defense is only possible because of information and materiel made available by the employer. If engineers were regularly developing things independently without any of this outside assistance, then your point would be valid--but that simply isn't how it works. Employers own the rights to the overwhelming majority of systems developed under their purview because they facilitated the development in the first place.

 

[DWG]

• Pay for additional redundancies and continuous competition

Did someone think Squid Game was a model for industrial development?

 

[Reddington777]

Employers own the rights to the overwhelming majority of systems developed under their purview because they facilitated the development in the first place.

Its stuff like this that makes my blood boil - not that I can't see the upsides to it either.

I don't want to go into philosophical debate, but the old argument goes that government owned enterprises suffocate competition while capitalist squid game style competition drives innovation. Yet, that means we spend so much time, man power and bureaucracy litigating over the tangled mess of IP ownership and "managing" projects that productivity, efficiency and synergy has been relegated to the backseat not by intention but necessarily as a byproduct of such a system.

I can't even count how many undeserving doctors, lawyers and MBA/finance people I know who were hell bent on doing those jobs since high school. I don't know a single aerospace engineer much less a maritime architect. People these days love to manage, to make money from money, and to feel like they are doing something worthwhile instead of actually pursuing jobs producing tangible, useful things. A lot of these jobs are created by a market full of redundancy, disconnect and bureaucracy, and if these were eliminated, half this country would lose their jobs (and arguably, many of these middle management people would find their best use doing menial tasks in a factory if it weren't for their extraordinary ability to bullshit).

I'm not sure what the Chinese system is or that it necessarily categorically produces qualitatively better products per unit, but it would appear that there's great benefit to government organized efforts when managed well despite a greater beauracratic load on government. Would an aircraft designed by CAC be mass produced at multiple government owned factories or something? I don't know.

How was it during the cold war? or has the procurement and project management process become far detached from how it was during the cold war?

Some possibly far fetched possibilities:
1. Take some percentage of ownership in companies so that they at least have a say in where and how things are going - as has this admin with LM.
2. Contract out programs, but own IP. Maybe have one company do the design, but then give production contracts to other companies as well. LM might of designed the F-35, but it didn't seem like there were any IP problems handing off production work to various other EU companies
3. Create joint ventures between different companies to work on large programs (like F-47) together. If you could assemble a first rate group of engineers from NG, Boeing and LM to work on a plane whose IP is owned by the US government and whose profits are split or something, you'd probably have a pretty good product that can then leverage all development participants' factories to mass produce. The downside to this is that depending on how much financial gain/hit this turns out for the companies in question, you could see a further reduction in the number of contractors and that's bad.
4. increase. the. damn. military. budget.

 

[tychosis]

Its stuff like this that makes my blood boil - not that I can't see the upsides to it either.

I've tried to parse your post here a couple of times but I'm not entirely certain I understand what your objections or frustrations are... or what you're trying to solve.

we spend so much time, man power and bureaucracy litigating over the tangled mess of IP ownership and "managing" projects

I don't really follow, can you cite an example of this litigation and how it's held up product development? I'm not entirely certain what you mean here or how it impacts the industry.

How was it during the cold war? or has the procurement and project management process become far detached from how it was during the cold war?

We are building far more complex systems than we did during the cold war, and these systems generally require the orchestration of multiple organizations and multiple supply chains--supply chains that are also providing similar products to the consumer sector at a scale that didn't exist back then.

great benefit to government organized efforts when managed well despite a greater beauracratic load on government

Anyone who has worked with any government program offices can tell you that competent engineers there are rare. Why? Some will say "money" but that really isn't true, nobody outside of the C-suite is getting rich doing this work. It's because competent engineers want to do real work, and there's little real work taking place at NAVSEA, NAVAIR, etc etc.

A lot of defense work stays with the primes simply because the overwhelming majority of systems in development are iterations of previous systems, so naturally they're going to stay where the work started. Some random scrub can't come in off the street and do this work.

 

[Reddington777]

I've tried to parse your post here a couple of times but I'm not entirely certain I understand what your objections or frustrations are... or what you're trying to solve.
I don't really follow, can you cite an example of this litigation and how it's held up product development? I'm not entirely certain what you mean here or how it impacts the industry.

The fact that IP, code access and data rights seems to be a point of constant consternation with respect to F-35 upgrades. Why should a mainstay program to all three air services constantly have to be kneecapped just because only LM can touch the code? As it sits, we have no choice but to sit here and wait until LM and friends either figure out what holding up an upgrade, or until LM and friends have the bandwidth to complete the upgrade - even if sharing the code and systems access with others might get more hands on deck to get upgrades out faster.

And it's not so much what litigation has actually stopped development as it its the threat of litigation that stops better, faster, or better managed solutions from being implemented (that is, assuming there are better solutions).

My frustration is that red tape, a stubborn adherence to questionable policies, and glacial speeds at which policy changes are themselves adding to the delay in fielding systems that were needed yesterday - not to mention whatever further delay there is inherent in the development process / lack of qualified people. It's my further frustration that despite promoting STEM since as early as when I was in elementary school, we still have a lack of qualified people working on things that matter - 30 years later.

 

[quellish]

Contract out programs, but own IP. Maybe have one company do the design, but then give production contracts to other companies as well.

…. That’s what they are doing right now (NGAD, etc)

 

[Training_Dummy]

I can't even count how many undeserving doctors, lawyers and MBA/finance people I know who were hell bent on doing those jobs since high school. I don't know a single aerospace engineer much less a maritime architect. People these days love to manage, to make money from money, and to feel like they are doing something worthwhile instead of actually pursuing jobs producing tangible, useful things. A lot of these jobs are created by a market full of redundancy, disconnect and bureaucracy, and if these were eliminated, half this country would lose their jobs (and arguably, many of these middle management people would find their best use doing menial tasks in a factory if it weren't for their extraordinary ability to bullshit).

Might we take this to the Bar?

My feeling is that this is a good topic that needs much more discussion and attention.

 

[Reddington777]

…. That’s what they are doing right now (NGAD, etc)

Yeah that's what I had in mind when I wrote that line. I thought I mentioned the F-47 in there but apparently I didn't. The way F-47 is being pursued seems like a good idea for other major acquisitions, particularly shipbuilding. But that may or may not require the navy to actually do something about designing their own ships again...

Also I'm aware too that apparently Boeing constructed parts of the F-22 as well. For the F-47, is the idea that pretty much the entire air frame can be passed off to other companies to assemble in their own factories? If not then how would it be any different than past fighters where sections were subcontracted out and final assembly occurred in the LM factories?

Might we take this to the Bar?

My feeling is that this is a good topic that needs much more discussion and attention.

My bad. I thought this was a bar topic - hence me going on a rant. So I'll stop here. If you want to, we can maybe just do private conversations for this one since it's basically my brain vomit.

 

[Training_Dummy]

Focus on the donut not the hole! what I snipped i think is a good starting post for the Bar - we would obviously just wind each other up in private conversation since I’ve made similar observations myself

 

[tychosis]

even if sharing the code and systems access with others might get more hands on deck to get upgrades out faster.

I don't know enough about the architecture to determine it would be feasible to farm out the work like this.

It really isn't that easy, especially with a system that already has this much history. (Full disclosure, I work for the prime in question but I am in RMS supporting sonar and have no skin in the aviation game.)

We have 20+ years of development in ARCI already, and it would be impossible to hand the product over to a third party. It would take them far longer to get up to speed and do any meaningful work than it would to solve the problem in-house. There are also significant risks in having multiple parties touching things... and aviation is far more risk-averse than we even are in submarines.

We do have partners who work on specific functions of the system, but they're sufficiently siloed that we don't have to worry too much about them breaking core functionality... but even then it still happens.

This sort of modularity is something you'd have to engineer from the beginning... and I spend most of my time fighting software developers and largely consider software "engineering" a myth.

 

[Reddington777]

I don't know enough about the architecture to determine it would be feasible to farm out the work like this.

This sort of modularity is something you'd have to engineer from the beginning... and I spend most of my time fighting software developers and largely consider software "engineering" a myth.

I'm a software dev and ... it's certainly risky if your partners really have not a damn idea what they are doing. I've heard horror stories from coworkers who were triaged to work on a healthcare app that was butchered by a 3rd party startup. That's why I floated the government led / joint venture idea. The DoDshould most definitely hire and sustain engineers and developers to own the software and lead a vetted joint team of first rate devs from the primes. With good oversight and singular, clear leadership / management, it should be feasible. I would hope that the F-47's software people have had this figured out.

We have 20+ years of development in ARCI already, and it would be impossible to hand the product over to a third party. It would take them far longer to get up to speed and do any meaningful work than it would to solve the problem in-house. There are also significant risks in having multiple parties touching things... and aviation is far more risk-averse than we even are in submarines.

That's fair. I've said before in other threads that the F-35 suffers today mainly because at its inception, the urgency to modernize wasn't there, and when the urgency was there, too much was set in stone already.

 

[tychosis]

That's fair. I've said before in other threads that the F-35 suffers today mainly because at its inception, the urgency to modernize wasn't there, and when the urgency was there, too much was set in stone already.

Yeah. I'd like to see things improve in that regard, but I'm not optimistic. As you well know as a dev--a robust and maintainable system requires a solid amount of foresight to get those things ironed out up front. That takes time and impacts schedule. All of our issues and compromises and the accumulation of technical debt is exclusively schedule-driven.

Unfortunately, I don't predict that this new initiative to "do it faster" is going to improve things.

 

[donnage99]

It isn't that easy. Nearly every invention in defense is only possible because of information and materiel made available by the employer. If engineers were regularly developing things independently without any of this outside assistance, then your point would be valid--but that simply isn't how it works. Employers own the rights to the overwhelming majority of systems developed under their purview because they facilitated the development in the first place.

I'm not saying the engineers should own the IP. I'm saying the government which thank God recent acquisitions are following that model. And it doesn't have to be outright owning the IP. Government can pay for the TDP, allowing manufacturer to retain IP for other licensing purposes. A great example in recent time is the JLTV. Government owns TDP and able to award another company with a better bid to continue mass production for the next tranche.

 

[joshjosh]

Acquisition Transformation Strategy

SECDEF Hegseth's comments today on DOD acquisition reform:

• Pentagon bureaucracy is the biggest adversary of the US today (bigger adversary than China), (a bit tongue-in-cheek)
  • Says that these opening remarks are almost verbatim a copy of Rumsfeld's speech in 2001
• Calls out grey-zone warfare, less-than-war operations that US adversaries engage in
• The DOD's self-reinforcing bloated bureaucracy results in a "lack of urgency, fear of innovation, and a fundamental lack of trust between the military customer our limited industrial base" - and the Primes benefit from this
• Objective: "transform the entire acquisition system to operate on a wartime footing." "This is a 1939 moment." 5 broad transformations:
  • 1. Inspire American industry to become a wartime industrial base that focuses on speed and volume
  • 2. Unleash the defense industrial and gov workforce by incentivizing progress over process
  • 3. Bias new acquisition and requirements processes for speed flexibility and efficiency
  • 4. Champion technical excellnce and higher risk thresholds to accelerate high performance production
  • 5. Provoke war speed, or warp speed, by procuring rapidly and sustaining readily as the default, not the exception
  • In short, increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk
• 5 overarching transformative pillars
  • 1. Stabilize demand signals. Award bigger, longer contracts for proven systems.
  • 2. Prioritize the purchase of industry driven solutions (commercial solutions), even if bids don't meet every requirement, go for the 85% solution
  • 3. Empower program leaders with authority to direct program outcomes, move money, and adjust priority of system performance to deliver on-time and under budget.
  • 4. Inject urgency and excellence into the DIB. DOD will only do business with industry partners that share the priority of speed and volume above all else.
  • 5. Regulatory reform: remove excessive rules and requirements, excessive testing oversight, excessively-long studies, etc.
  • Bottom line: move from the current system dominated by large primes to a system powered by dynamic vendors with the ability to scale quickly
• To reform the requirements process, JCIDS is cancelled. In it's place, 3 things:
  • 1. Requirements and Resourcing Alignments Board (RRAB) is hereby established, a new forum co-led by DEPSECDEF and Vice CJCS, to tie money directly to top warfighting priorities
  • 2. Mission Engineering and Integration Activity (MEIA) is established, to bring the best minds, government, industry, and labs together early to experiment, iterate, and prototype solutions
  • 3. Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR) is established, a funding pool set aside to move promising solutions straight into the fight
  • 4. Each service will review its own requirements process and align internal priorities to the new joint system
  • (yes, I know this is 4 things, don't blame me)
• Defense Acquisitions System is now renamed to Warfighting Acquisition System. The core principle: place accountable decision makers as close as possible to the program execution as possible, eliminate layers of bureaucracy that hinder them, and empower them with the authority and flexibility to drive timely delivery.
  • PEOs are reorganized into Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAEs). Chain of authority will run directly from the program manager to the PAE. Each PAE will be the single accountable official for the portfolio, and will have the authority to act and make changes, and will be held accountable for results.
  • The DOD will establish adaptable test approaches, evaluate multi-track acquisition strategies to allow 3rd party surge manufacturing capacity, maintain a standard to carry at least 2 qualified sources through initial production, and establish module-level competition through MOSA.
  • The PAE is responsible for mission success. PAE tenure will be longer than current PEO service times. PAEs will be authorized to switch funding between programs within their portfolio between existing programs, or quickly adopt new technologies.
  • Programs will be schedule-driven. Field mature technologies before threat windows close. Require rapid fielding dates with clear goals for costs and reasonable mission effectiveness standards. All other attributes must remain tradeable.
  • DOD will partner with Congress on funding to acheive the above.
• Test & Evaluation reform:
  • Portfolio scorecards will score PAEs primarily on speed to capability
  • Focus on operational availability and mission capability rates of current weapons systems
• No more monopolies: increased incentives for component-level competition.
• Commercial products and off-the-shelf offerings will be the default, not the exception
• We will buy solutions, not specifications
• Wartime Production Unit (WPU) hereby established
  • "Deal Team" will establish business deals that establish groundbreaking production capacity
  • Deal Team will work with PAEs to negotiate with vendors based on a broader perspective of the vendor's broader book of business within the DOD, rather than through the lense of a single program.
  • Deal Team will craft incentives that prioritize speed
  • The WPU will partner with industry leaders in the DIB
• The DOD will try to incentivize private companies and private capital to invest their own funding to grow capacity. Contractors "must" invest their own capital to grow their own capacity and assume risk, or else.
• The Defense Acquisition University is hereby transformed into a competency-based institution called the Warfighting Acquisition University.
• Foreign Military Sales (FMS) reform: partners and allies want capabilities delivered faster
  • DISCA and DTSA removed from undersecretary of defense for policy and moved to USD for sustainment
  • DOD procurement planning will plan against a combination of US and FMS demand
  • Much more to come on FMS reform
• "So much of this is about magazine depth"

WATCH: Hegseth outlines new weapons buying priorities in remarks at National War College

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Friday the Pentagon is revamping how the military buys weapons, shifting the focus away from producing advanced and complex technology and toward products that can be made and delivered quickly.

www.pbs.org

 

[baseball801802]

I see this as a good thing. I would rather my tax dollars go straight to the cool planes instead of federal grift. This is speculative but I see this as a strategic mirror to chinas nationalized approach.

 

[tychosis]

Frankly, I don't expect any of this to change much of anything. These top-down solutions never work, primarily because the people at the top have zero understanding of how thing actually work on the deckplate.

You have to fix these things from the bottom up--and I've mentioned before that these generally fall on deaf ears because many of them are some variation of "people need to get better" and no one is interested in that. Everyone has opinions until things actually start to get hard.

(But hey, we'll do it again in 15-20 years or so.)

 

[DWG]

even if sharing the code and systems access with others might get more hands on deck to get upgrades out faster.

The Mythical Man-Month would like a word....

 

[DWG]

We have 20+ years of development in ARCI already, and it would be impossible to hand the product over to a third party. It would take them far longer to get up to speed and do any meaningful work than it would to solve the problem in-house. There are also significant risks in having multiple parties touching things... and aviation is far more risk-averse than we even are in submarines.

Absolutely. Collective project/institutional knowledge is vital to understanding not just what was done and why, but also what wasn't done and why, and much of that knowledge resides in the heads of the people who've been working on the project for years, because it's stuff they don't even have to articulate for everyone to understand.

Not to mention that the development environment may be closely coupled with the actual deliverables. Think about the issues threatening the German F126 frigate, and that's just problems using the same Catia data package across Damen in the Netherlands and Luerssen in Germany. Now imagine you're trying to transfer the project to a company that doesn't use Catia. Or it's software and they don't use the same compiler, or a different design by contract verifier, or whatever. Essentially you need to replicate the source company's development environment, or you can't be certain of replicating the original product, which may mean a major retesting effort just to stand still. What happens if the test rigs weren't a deliverable?

Think of all the proposals for restarting production of various military aircraft we've seen over the past few years, and how none of them have gone through once the actual costs have been worked out. You're looking at similar issues for swapping a project between primes and I don't think the people proposing it have any technical understanding of the complexity involved.

We actually tried pulling out a year old variant of our project and starting it up again as an experiment, and it fell over for a bunch of unexpected reasons. Transferring a project between companies would be the same, but magnitudes worse.

 

[tychosis]

Transferring a project between companies would be the same, but magnitudes worse.

Yeah.

I led the tech refresh of the transmit group on the BLKI/II boats. Raytheon originally designed it before they were pushed out of submarine sonar work (because they suck.)

It was extraordinarily painful. It was a poorly-documented system that was mostly bodged together from leftover 688i garbage (see the comment above about Raytheon sucking) and very few of the people involved in the original design were still around. We effectively had to reverse-engineer many parts of the system, and the bulk of the technical documentation I had were some indecipherable spreadsheets and a stack of drawings.

(Even worse, the only units I had to work with in our lab were old engineering development models which didn't even match the final design--so if something just didn't seem right all I could do was sift through a pile of engineering change instructions trying to find when a relevant change might have been cut in and implement that change on my EDM.)

When we did need further supporting documentation from them... let me just say they were far from helpful. I often had to be the bad guy and go to the Navy to get them to force the handover.

 

[iverson]

Its stuff like this that makes my blood boil - not that I can't see the upsides to it either.

I don't want to go into philosophical debate, but the old argument goes that government owned enterprises suffocate competition while capitalist squid game style competition drives innovation. Yet, that means we spend so much time, man power and bureaucracy litigating over the tangled mess of IP ownership and "managing" projects that productivity, efficiency and synergy has been relegated to the backseat not by intention but necessarily as a byproduct of such a system.

I can't even count how many undeserving doctors, lawyers and MBA/finance people I know who were hell bent on doing those jobs since high school. I don't know a single aerospace engineer much less a maritime architect. People these days love to manage, to make money from money, and to feel like they are doing something worthwhile instead of actually pursuing jobs producing tangible, useful things. A lot of these jobs are created by a market full of redundancy, disconnect and bureaucracy, and if these were eliminated, half this country would lose their jobs (and arguably, many of these middle management people would find their best use doing menial tasks in a factory if it weren't for their extraordinary ability to bullshit).

I'm not sure what the Chinese system is or that it necessarily categorically produces qualitatively better products per unit, but it would appear that there's great benefit to government organized efforts when managed well despite a greater beauracratic load on government. Would an aircraft designed by CAC be mass produced at multiple government owned factories or something? I don't know.

How was it during the cold war? or has the procurement and project management process become far detached from how it was during the cold war?

Some possibly far fetched possibilities:
1. Take some percentage of ownership in companies so that they at least have a say in where and how things are going - as has this admin with LM.
2. Contract out programs, but own IP. Maybe have one company do the design, but then give production contracts to other companies as well. LM might of designed the F-35, but it didn't seem like there were any IP problems handing off production work to various other EU companies
3. Create joint ventures between different companies to work on large programs (like F-47) together. If you could assemble a first rate group of engineers from NG, Boeing and LM to work on a plane whose IP is owned by the US government and whose profits are split or something, you'd probably have a pretty good product that can then leverage all development participants' factories to mass produce. The downside to this is that depending on how much financial gain/hit this turns out for the companies in question, you could see a further reduction in the number of contractors and that's bad.
4. increase. the. damn. military. budget.

I agree with all but #4. That's a whole separate argument (it might be that excessive budgets have driven habitual inefficiency in industry and lackadaisical management by the services).

As far as your other points go:

* Before WW2, the US government bought aircraft designs and then had companies bid on production of the designs. The design company had no guarantee that it would get a production contract. It had to compete. Post-war, the USAF/USN and the aircraft companies argued that this was somehow undesirable/inefficient/???, even though we still seem to do the same thing with a lot of Army equipment, such as rifles.

* Much of the so-called "IP" should in any case belong to the US government. The services, DOD labs, NASA, and universities operating under government grants do almost all of the basic research and testing that enables the technology and directly pays for the remaining research that the contractors do.

 

[joshjosh]

SBIR Contracts, On Hold During Shutdown, Face Long-Term Risk | Air & Space Forces Magazine

A legislative standoff has led to a lapse in a $4.26 billion small business innovation contracting program widely used by the Air Force and could spell the end of it entirely, industry sources warned Air & Space Forces Magazine.

www.airandspaceforces.com

There's certainly room for improvement within SBIR, but it does produce results. It's also directly in line with the new acquisition reforms. If SBIR just completely dies, I think that would be a huge mistake.

 

[DWG]

* Before WW2, the US government bought aircraft designs and then had companies bid on production of the designs. The design company had no guarantee that it would get a production contract. It had to compete. Post-war, the USAF/USN and the aircraft companies argued that this was somehow undesirable/inefficient/???, even though we still seem to do the same thing with a lot of Army equipment, such as rifles.

The UK had a similar system, however we're working in a much more complex environment now rather than then. Within WWII engineering, and aerodynamics, there was some margin for doing things in different ways, or to marginally different tolerances, or using different production techniques to get to the same end. But nowadays tolerances have grown finer, aerodynamics more critical, and software requires every change to be in precisely the right format. We've lost the wiggle-room that meant it didn't always matter if one production line's product was marginally off from another's.

It used to be any engineer or draughtsman could look at a plan and understand it*, but now the equivalent understanding may represent the culmination of man-millennia of work, and no one person has the time to gain that understanding.

A current generation rifle might be a bit esoteric for a WWII firearms designer, but they could understand the function and engineering relatively easily. The same isn't true for a WWII aircraft or warship designer, the complexity and specialization of developer's roles have reached levels that simply hadn't been dreamed of. And ultimately that means what could be done then couldn't necessarily be done now. Build to print can be done, that just needs understanding the production engineering to replicate precisely what the other guy was producing, but continued development is another thing entirely, and it seems that continued development is what the US government is discussing.

* Or at least the basic structure of it, the precise function and reasoning might be a bit more selective.

 

[Reddington777]

@DWG @tychosis

In regards to the software stuff, I think it could possibly be helped by a joint venture sorta thing between primes and with the government team leads working on stuff? That way you have permanence, unified vision/goals and more hands on deck rather than being bottlenecked by not having enough capable people on one company.

 

[tychosis]

In regards to the software stuff, I think it could possibly be helped by a joint venture sorta thing between primes and with the government team leads working on stuff? That way you have permanence, unified vision/goals and more hands on deck rather than being bottlenecked by not having enough capable people on one company.

The government personnel just don't have the skillset. Few of them have real, practical engineering/development skills and experience with the system under their purview. Any engineer worth his salt wants to be where the work is, and that isn't in the program office.

Most of my time is in IRAD now, but when I was primarily supporting production the bulk of my work was spent solving problems. Having more people won't necessarily make that faster.

 

[joshjosh]

Pentagon wants ‘calculated’ risk culture in weapons buying revamp

The Pentagon said its overhauled acquisition strategy emphasizes — but doesn't mandate — speed in weapons buying.

www.defensenews.com

 

[yasotay]

The U.S.Army FLRAA (MV-75) program has been designed from the start to exercise this new methodology. The Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA) clearly states the government owns the rights to the platform. Hypothetically while Bell is building the aircraft, if Boeing designs a better wing the government has full authority to let Boeing revise the aircraft. That is of course an extreme example. More likely will be rapid changes to the software of the platform and some of the mission equipment. It is anyone's guess if this will be a faster and less costly method.

It briefs well on Power Point.

 

[joshjosh]

The CAVASShips crew weighed in on Hegseth's acquisition reform plans and Secretary Phelan. Their comments were... less than enthusiastic.

View: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6jQ4aGZbvm3MPbkjviObyj

 

[joshjosh]

https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4329487/secretary-of-war-announces-acquisition-reform/

The following memorandums were referenced by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during his remarks at the National War College on Fort McNair, Washington, D.C., on Friday, November 7. These directives outline the Department's next phase of acquisition.


The memorandums—"Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System to Accelerate Fielding of Urgently Needed Capabilities to Our Warriors," "Reforming the Joint Requirements Process to Accelerate Fielding of Warfighting Capabilities," and "Unifying the Department's Arms Transfer and Security Cooperation Enterprise to Improve Efficiency and Enable Burden-Sharing"— direct sweeping reforms across the Department of War to strengthen deterrence, rebuild the industrial base, and accelerate capability delivery to the warfighter.

Together with the newly released Acquisition Transformation Strategy, these memorandums redefine how the Department develops requirements, manages programs, and engages industry to ensure America's warfighters receive critical capabilities at the speed of relevance.


For more information the strategy and memorandums can be found here: