The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), believes Congress should ask more questions about whether the Pentagon is adequately pursuing open architecture solutions in systems, and said he will take a look at the issue as part of his effort to reform the acquisition process.
Thornberry did not say whether he will formally include language on the issue of designing and developing open architecture systems as part of his effort to reform acquisition in the 2016 defense authorization bill. He suggested that mandating OA solutions may not be the best approach, but instead Congress should examine ways to incentivize it and improve oversight.
“Those are questions we need to ask, not as much on a DoD-wide level, but program by program,” Thornberry said when asked about the subject by Defense Daily during a chat with a small group of reporters on Thursday. “Part of the questions we need to routinely ask are: Are requirements changing? Does this have open architecture that will allow greater competition in the future? If it doesn’t, what’s the reason that it doesn’t?”
The Pentagon has been moving to embrace open architecture solutions, seen as a way to drive down cost through program re-competitions, spur innovation among contractors, enable rapid technology upgrades and lower long-term sustainability costs. Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall has highlighted the importance of open architecture approaches in his Better Buying Power initiatives.
Thornberry is working on a broad set of reform proposals he said he expects to reveal in March. He has identified acquisition reform as a top priority since taking charge of HASC following last November’s elections and the retirement of his predecessor, California Republican Howard “Buck” McKeon.
HASC has requested and received ideas from Kendall, and gotten input from program managers and other officials, and will continuously seek industry’s thoughts once it outlines new initiatives, Thornberry said. The feedback is needed to ensure news ideas will be successful and that others will not make the system more cumbersome than it already is.
“A key thing for me is how can we reduce the regulations, the constraints that just add cost and time to acquisition, simplify, but at the same time have accountability for those decisions?” he said, noting that it is hard to hold individuals accountable under the current setup.
Thornberry said he is well aware of previous attempts by Congress to reform acquisition that in many respects added layers and regulations to the process and made it more difficult, time consuming and costly. He cautioned that no single piece of legislation will solve all the problems, but instead he’s hoping to gradually improve the process.
“We are not going to try to do it all at once,” he said, adding that at the very least, he wants to “be like a doctor and do no harm.”