By Emelie Rutherford
House lawmakers are moving toward requiring the Pentagon more often to secure the rights to technical designs underlying weapon systems developed by contractors.
A new defense-acquisition-reform bill, approved yesterday by a House panel and pegged for a House vote next week, calls for the Pentagon to increase its acquisition of technical-data rights to support the long-term sustainment of weapon systems.
Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) said he wants to go further and require the Pentagon obtain such data for Navy and Marine Corps systems, to allow contractors to compete to build follow-on copies of other companies’ platforms.
Taylor, chairman of the Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), said he will try to add such a legislative mandate to the fiscal year 2011 defense authorization bill when the full committee finalizes it next month. He would target systems under his panel’s jurisdiction, such as the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship and the alternate engine for the multi-service F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
“I think we ought to own the technical data package,” Taylor told Defense Daily. “We paid for the development costs, and it just makes sense in a world where you are literally one dirty bomb away from a factory, a sole-source supplier, being out of business. We ought to have those specs to take to a second vendor in an emergency to get things that this nation needs. And, quite honestly, I think it will create a more competitive situation for everybody.”
The full HASC marked up and approved yesterday the Implementing Management for Performance and Related Reforms to Obtain Value in Every (IMPROVE) Acquisition Act of 2010. The bill is intended to address the 80 percent of defense acquisitions not targeted by the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, which was approved last year and focuses on large weapon-system procurements.
The HASC added the provision regarding buying technical data rights to aid with systems’ sustainment to the reform bill yesterday via an amendment from Rep. Jim Marshall (D- Ga.).
Marshall said his amendment is focused on helping the Pentagon gain the technical data packages to help with systems’ sustainment, not necessarily to help increase competition of the platforms when they’re being purchased.
“But it’s reasonable to think that there might be instances where acquisition of data rights and other assets during the process of actually acquiring these things over a period of years is sensible, because it winds up saving costs through competition,” Marshall told Defense Daily.
The full House is expected to take up the new reform bill next week. HASC Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) also plans to fold the legislation in the FY ’11 defense authorization bill, in an attempt to ensure the reform measure is addressed by the Senate.
The IMPROVE Acquisition Act of 2010, which grew out of the work of the HASC’s recently disbanded Defense Acquisition Reform Panel, is divided into sections on the defense- acquisition system, the defense-acquisition workforce, financial management, and the industrial base.
Richard Sylvester, vice president of acquisition policy at the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), said his industry group has no major qualms with the bill. The AIA only has found small adjustments it wants made, such as refining the definition of “non-traditional” suppliers, he told Defense Daily.
The reform legislation calls for the defense secretary to create a program to expand the defense industrial base, to increase competition and the Pentagon’s access to innovation, by using tools to better communicate with suppliers that have received contracts worth less than $100,000 in the past five years (Defense Daily, April 15). Under the bill, this program would continuously review the industrial base and identify markets of importance to the Pentagon.
The HASC added provisions to the bill yesterday that would:
- compel the Pentagon to create a panel, made up of large and small “non-traditional” defense contractors that will create recommendations on eliminating barriers to contracting with the Pentagon;
- require the Defense Department craft a program that compels more interaction between the acquisition workforce and the people who use the products it purchases; and
- amend the legal definition of the industrial base, in U.S. Code, to include firms that provide information technology and services.
Sylvester noted most of the bill is focused on how the Pentagon, as opposed to the defense industry, should act. He said the AIA always welcomes attention paid to expanding the industrial base, and said more could be done.
The Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, which President Barack Obama signed into law last May, created new cost-oversight positions in the Pentagon, changed Nunn- McCurdy rules for major defense programs that suffer cost breaches, and included multiple provisions intended to thwart cost and schedule problems with large weapon systems early in their development cycles (Defense Daily, May 22, 2009).