In all new development and acquisition programs, the Air Force wants the ability to rapidly and affordably upgrade both hardware and software without being beholden to the systems’ original manufacturer.
William LaPlante, chief of Air Force acquisitions, insists the service must demand open architecture systems and take ownership of the “interface,” or the basic blueprints, of every new program to avoid being hamstrung by proprietary designs.
In a hyper-simplified analogy, LaPlante likened traditional acquisition models to buying a house without free access to electricity. He spoke July 9 at a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
“Imagine you buy your house from a builder … and all the AC plugs in the house are proprietary to that builder,” LaPlante said. “You want to put any new appliances in there? You got to go to the builder. Can you go to the store and buy a different appliance and plug it in? No. Can you put an adapter on it? Yes, but they don’t work that well and the adapters are kind of expensive.
“That’s the equivalent of the situation we have in a lot of our military systems,” he added. “All open architecture is, is to say ‘No.’”
Open architectures lend speed and agility to an acquisition process that has traditionally been marked by bureaucracy, inefficiency and bloated development cost and schedule, LaPlante said.
“There are a lot of aspects of adaptability and agility that we can use in acquisition,” he said. “The metric for agility is speed. You want to be faster than the adversary. You want to be fast enough to keep up with technology. You want to be fast enough to take advantage of the warfighter as they learn how to use the stuff.”
“When you can’t do something really fast–build the next generation bomber … then build in hooks and open architecture–we call them pivot points–to allow you to adjust the system as the technology changes and as you learn. That’s how we’re doing the bomber. That’s why we’re going to open systems. That’s what open systems allows you to do.”
Over the past three years, the net cost of Air Force acquisition programs has gone down, even while the individual cost of certain programs has risen, he said.
“The one area we still aren’t getting right, and this is true for the other services. The data shows this. Is the time it takes to do development,” LaPlante said.
On average, the Air Force plans for a five-year development phase from milestone B–when development is launched–to milestone C when the platform is ready for production, LaPlante said. That development for most programs turns out to be at least seven years, he said.
“It’s fascinating when you look at it because it’s not bureaucracy that’s causing five years to become seven,” he said. “It’s software, not doing the engineering flow-down.”
The Air Force has created a consortium dedicated to open mission systems (OMS) that has “rallied around common standards” for platform development, LaPlante said. With such programs in place, platforms and systems can be more rapidly updated. But without access to rapidly developed applications and software updates, much like those churned out by the commercial sector for smartphones, “you might as well just buy a new damn phone,” he said.
“It’s not enough just to set this up,” LaPlante added. The Air Force is proposing a process for rapidly procuring prototype software and hardware that circumnavigates the traditional acquisition channels called PlugFest Plus.
After an industry day where companies show off their prototypes, the Air Force will seek out consortia that have been granted alternate transactional authority and fund worthy projects within three weeks or less.
“If we’re impressed enough … why don’t we just fund these guys and get these guys under contract and see if we can do it in a couple weeks?” he said.
A month ago, the Air Force used the process to upgrade both software and hardware for the distributed common ground system (DCGS) intelligence sharing system that both it and the Army use. Nineteen companies participated and the service hopes to have one on contract within a few weeks. Now the Air Force is designing a consortium with transactional authority to speed up that process to within three weeks, LaPlante said.