17 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial

Air Force aims to move startups from pitch to contract award in 24 hours

WASHINGTON — A fledgling five-person software start-up has just wrapped up their pitch to what could be a key investor. The pressure has been intense, but the customer decides to bite, sliding a credit card through a Square reader to award money to the company's Paypal account.

This isn't an episode of Shark Tank, or a successful bid to get investment dollars from a Silicon Valley angel investor. The customer in this scenario is the Air Force — or at least, its acquisition executive would like it to be.

During the Air Force Association's annual conference, Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, will announce a series of “Startup Days” targeted toward involving startup companies in Air Force acquisition by rapidly awarding contracts in less than 24 hours.

“From the company's view, it will be a single day. From our view, we could probably turn it as quickly as a few days to a week — we put a call out, someone submits their idea, we analyze their idea, we check their company profile, we then invite a subset that have met the criteria,” he told Defense News in an exclusive Sept. 7 interview.

“But then, when they come in to pitch their idea, they have a reasonable expectation of leaving with funding. We're ready to go or not go on a single day,” he continued. “And the contract length? One page.”

When Defense News spoke with Roper, he had just gotten the green light to move ahead with this new way of awarding contracts. The effort remains in its early stages, and dates for Startup Day have not been chosen, although Roper believes the service could hold a series of Startup Days as soon as the end of this year or early 2019.

The exact format is still being worked out as well: Program managers will be able to suggest precise technical problems that they'd like to see solutions for, but he'd also like to give companies the latitude to pitch their products for requirements the Air Force doesn't even know it has.

Companies will submit proposals, which will be evaluated by Air Force program and contacting officials who will also analyze the company's profile — its number of employees, business type, product maturity and potential impact. But the goal is to have the actual events structured like a meeting with an angel investor, not the typical PowerPoint-laden gatherings of military officials and defense primes.

“We've got to make this look more like Kickstarter than a defense industry day,” Roper said. “We may even put them on contract swiping a Square reader. We have government purchase cards that we're able to use for small purchases — up to $150k per transaction. That may be the mechanism we use because most companies that are startups, I'm going to guess, have a Paypal account.”

An industry day geared specifically for start-up companies is just the latest way the Air Force is trying to harness a commercial technology boom where innovation has often been led by startups. Last year, the service announced the creation of a new organization called AFWERX that it began to help engage elements of the private sector that don't usually work with the government.

However, even with AFWERX in operation, it takes the Air Force six to eight weeks to award a contract at its very fastest. And that's still too slow of a pace to enable it to work effectively with startup companies, Roper said.

“There's this artificial ceiling that small companies can't reach to work with the government simply because they're too small to wait for a paycheck. If they're not on contract with us now, they've got to work with an investor fast enough to fund cash flow rates that startups need to grow,” he said.

Roper doesn't expect all investments to bear fruit, but efforts like Startup Day have other advantages, he said. It gets Air Force contracting officers more comfortable with executing rapid contracts, potentially gives program managers a more effective way of spending their small business dollars and allows the service to have a voice in the kinds of technologies that cutting-edge companies develop.

“I hope that will mean that every year when we do this — if it's successful, we'll do it every year—companies will have us on their radar screen and think, ‘The Air Force is a great way for us to get from being a company of five to a company of 50...and then we'll go off and become billionaires working with Amazon and Google,'” he said. “But this way they'll know us and their products and projects will have been influenced by us, hopefully for the betterment of the Air Force.”

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/air-force-association/2018/09/17/air-force-aims-to-move-startups-from-pitch-to-contract-award-in-24-hours

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3 août 2018 | International, C4ISR

General Dynamics wins Army IT contract worth billions
By: Daniel Cebul WASHINGTON — The Army awarded General Dynamics Mission Systems a contract worth as much as $3.9 billion for commercial off-the-shelf IT hardware that could be purchased quickly during the next three years. In an Aug. 1 announcement, the Department of Defense said the contract would be used for the Army's common hardware systems 5th generation (CHS-5) program. The three-year indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract has a possible $3.9 billion ceiling, that includes two one-year options. The CHS-5 funding will serve as a kind of piggy bank for the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and more than 100 DoD program offices to draw from for the rapid acquisition and delivery of tactical commercial-off-the-shelf IT hardware. The contract also covers technical assistance support services and logistics support, including repair and replacement of equipment. It accounts for between 75,000 to 100,00 pieces of hardware. “The buying power and rapid execution of COTS IT hardware procurements and services are what makes CHS valuable to the Army,” Breck Tarr, the program's product lead, said in an Sept. 2017 press release. “We want to see proposals with innovative techniques to reduce timelines without compromising quality. The ability to deliver the exact configuration when the Government needs hardware is critical to supporting fielding schedules and sustainment.” CHS-5 builds on the previous contract, the unsurprisingly named CHS-4. The new contract was expected to include a pre-negotiation pricing schedule for the life of the contract; additional warranty options; incentives to provide the lowest price hardware; and the ability to procure technical data packages based on competitive pricing, according to an Army press release. Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/08/02/general-dynamics-wins-army-it-contract-worth-billions/
15 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial

L'équipementier Rafaut se renforce dans la Défense
L'Usine Nouvelle revient sur la croissance de Rafaut, qui a annoncé le 4 mars avoir acquis Lace, filiale de Lisi Aerospace, spécialisée dans les accroches pour hélicoptères. Une acquisition qui représente la seconde opération de croissance externe en deux mois pour Rafaut, après le rachat en janvier de Secapem, qui développe des radars et des systèmes d'entraînement au tir pour les forces armées. « Nous complétons nos métiers dans la Défense. Dans ce secteur, les contrats internationaux imposent désormais une taille critique », explique Bruno Berthet, président de Rafaut, basé à Villeneuve-la-Garenne (Hauts-de-Seine). Ces deux nouvelles activités, qui représentent environ 80 nouveaux salariés, apportent un volume d'affaires de 13 millions d'euros. L'Usine Nouvelle du 15 mars
10 juillet 2018 | International, Naval

Has the US Navy thought this new frigate through? New report raises questions.
By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Navy is rapidly moving toward procuring the first hull in its new class of frigate in 2020, but a new report is raising questions about whether the Navy has done detailed analysis about what it needs out of the ship before barging ahead. The Navy may not have done an adequate job of analyzing gaps and capabilities shortfalls before it set itself on a fast-track to buying the so-called FFG(X) as an adaptation from a parent design, said influential Navy analyst Ron O'Rourke in a new Congressional Research Service report. In essence, the CRS report questions whether the Navy looked at what capabilities the service already has in the fleet, what capabilities it's missing and whether the FFG(X) is the optimal solution to address any identified shortfalls. O'Rourke suggests Congress push the Navy on “whether procuring a new class of FFGs is the best or most promising general approach for addressing the identified capability gaps and mission needs, and whether the Navy has performed a formal, rigorous analysis of this issue, as opposed to relying solely on subjective judgments of Navy or [Defense Department] leaders.” ““Subjective judgments, though helpful, can overlook counter-intuitive results regarding the best or most promising general approach,” the report reads. “Potential alternative general approaches for addressing identified capability gaps and mission needs in this instance include (to cite a few possibilities) modified LCSs, FFs, destroyers, aircraft, unmanned vehicles, or some combination of these platforms.” The Navy is looking to adapt its FFG(X) from an existing design such as Fincantieri's FREMM, one of the two existing littoral combat ships or the Coast Guard's national security cutter as a means of getting updated capabilities into a small surface combatant and into the fleet quickly. A better approach, O'Rourke suggests, would be to make a formal, rigorous analysis of alternatives to its current course. Failure to do so has led to a series of setbacks with the Navy's current small surface combatant program, the LCS. “The Navy did not perform a formal, rigorous analysis of this kind prior to announcing the start of the LCS program in November 2001, and this can be viewed as a root cause of much of the debate and controversy that attended the LCS program, and of the program's ultimate restructurings in February 2014 and December 2015,” O'Rourke writes. O'Rourke further suggests the Navy is relying too much on subjective opinions of Navy and Defense Department leaders, instead of a legitimate analysis. And indeed, the Navy has made rapid acquisition of the new ship the hallmark of the program. “Subjective judgments can be helpful, particularly in terms of capturing knowledge and experience that is not easily reduced to numbers, in taking advantage of the ‘wisdom of the crowd,‘ and in coming to conclusions and making decisions quickly,” O'Rourke argues. “On the other hand, a process that relies heavily on subjective judgments can be vulnerable to group-think, can overlook counter-intuitive results regarding capability gaps and mission needs, and, depending on the leaders involved, can emphasize those leaders' understanding of the Navy's needs.” Read the full report here. https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2018/07/09/has-the-us-navy-thought-this-new-frigate-through-new-report-raises-questions/

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