Proponents of acquisition reform within the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) see modular, open-systems architectures as a potential panacea for what ails defense acquisition.
Open architecture requirements are a key tenet of the acquisition reforms put forth by House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R.-Texas), who recognizes the flexibility OA offers in keeping pace with rapidly evolving threats.
A panel of acquisition officials, analysts and industry insiders on Monday said that OA could spell the end of catastrophic failures of marquis development programs like the Army’s Future Combat Systems. OA systems also would cushion a contractor’s fall after losing a prime contract like the B-21 bomber and lessen the likelihood of protests, said Kate Blakeley, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA).
“Right now, we have the approach where these major programs are kind of like a comet. You have to grab onto it. You have to develop this, that and the other thing because when is your next chance going to come?” Blakeley said during a forum on acquisition reform hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “That is something that was key in sinking the Future Combat System a decade ago. It had to be all things to all people and really bring a lot of things across the finish line with it, which ultimately of course did not end up happening and was a very expensive diversion of resources.”
William LaPlante, vice president of the National Security Engineering Center at MITRE Corp., said OA sounds like an easy fix, but is only half of the equation for establishing rapid technological refresh cycles. LaPlante was a major proponent of OA systems during his previous job as chief of acquisition for the Air Force, where he advocated for modular architectures for future iterations of the notoriously proprietary Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Once the OA standards are established, the government has to whet industry’s appetite for developing and pitching upgrades, he said.
“Open architectures, even when you have them, if you do not fund a way to have an onramp of new technologies at a regular pace or cadence, you’re building a catcher’s mitt with no baseballs headed at you,” LaPlante said. “One of the things you have to do when you set up an open architecture is set up an onramp to get new technology in there. You can’t, in my opinion, just expect IRAD or industry to come forward on its own without ways to get technologies in.”
If those pathways open, they will provide defense contractors more opportunities to win contracts within and aside from marquis programs like the B-21 bomber, Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) or Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV), Blakeley said. Companies that invest internal funding in prototype platforms could lose the primary competition but make money on components and subsystems in subsequent upgrade purchases, she said.
“You have a lot more opportunities for competition,” she said. “If you are recompeting these things every five years or every 10 years, you have a lot more opportunity for new market entrance and a lot more opportunity for the contractor that maybe didn’t win the original award or maybe won the last cycle, to come in and make some money. It’s not an existential moment every time you are awarding a major contract anymore.”
Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s chief weapon buyer, recently pushed back on the 2016 NDAA making OA a requirement for all acquisition programs. The deputy defense secretary thought the bill language too restrictive to his office of acquisition, technology and logistics (AT&L)
Blakely predicted the final NDAA would soften on making OA standards compulsory, but would strongly recommend they be required. Along with open architectures, the bill also will encourage the services and DoD to normalize various rapid prototyping endeavors, she said.
“This is not something that you really have to hold DoD’s feet to the fire…part of the point of the bill is to take all these disparate lines of effort and make them more systemic, to make them more understandable and more supported not only within DoD but also within Congress.”
Thornberry will be challenged to convince his lawmaker colleagues that some amount of failure should be expected and welcomed. They will have to resist launching inquiries and holding hearings every time a program adopts and rejects certain technologies or falls short of a projected capability, Blakeley said.
“You have to accept a certain amount of base-level failure without freaking out about ‘Oh, we’ve wasted X millions of dollars in a constrained budget environment. This is terrible. We need to have a hearing,’ to acknowledge that you are not going to hit a homerun at every at bat,” she said. “Being able to adapt that flexibility so that you can harvest the things that you have really hit out of the park and bring them on into your acquisition program and…have a much faster tech innovation cycle and lifespan without sacrificing agility.”
There is an ingrained status-quo bias in Congress in favor of legacy systems and the acquisition system as it currently exists, Blakely said. It has manifested in recent years in resistance to base closures and retirement of platforms like the A-10 Warthog, she said. The flipside is a rigidity in acquisition that establishes milestones that become lighting rods when missed, inspiring dedicated detractors like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his passionate routine criticism of large Air Force acquisition programs like the B-21 and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, to name one such lawmaker.
“That is and I think will continue to be a roadblock to a fundamental shift in course,” she said. “Where I think you have a little more window for maneuverability without raising as many specters in politics is with a modular approach.”