31 décembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

Six things on the Pentagon’s 2019 acquisition reform checklist

WASHINGTON — Under the purview of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, reform has become a buzzword inside the Department of Defense, with every office trying to find ways to be more efficient, whether through cost savings or changes to bureaucracy.

The department's Acquisition and Sustainment office, headed by Ellen Lord, manages billions of dollars in materiel; and by Lord's own belief, it is ripe for changes that could net the department big savings.

On Dec. 17, Lord sat down with reporters and outlined a series of goals for 2019 that she hopes will help transform how the Pentagon buys equipment. Here, then, are six key items to watch for in the coming year.

1. Rework the department's key acquisition rules: The DoD Instruction 5000.02 is a key bedrock that forms the basis of how the defense acquisition system works, guiding acquisition professionals in their day-to-day program execution. And if Lord gets her way, she'll largely rip it up and start over.

“In 2019, one of my key objectives is to rewrite 5000.02. We have, right now, this huge, complicated acquisition process that we encourage our acquisition professionals to tailor to their needs,” Lord said. “We are going to invert that approach and take a clean sheet of paper and write the absolute bare minimum to be compliant in 5000.02, and encourage program managers and contracting officers to add to that as they need for specific programs.”

Lord envisions taking the massive, unwieldy 5000.02 guidance and getting it down to “a couple page outline of what you need to do,” with “simple” contract language and an easy-to-follow checklist “so that this isn't an onerous process.”

“I'm encouraging what I call creative compliance. I want everyone to be compliant, but I want people to be very thoughtful and only use what they need,” she said. “This is literally starting with a clean sheet of paper, looking at the law and the intent, and working to vastly simplify this.”

Andrew Hunter, a former Pentagon acquisition official now with the Center for International and Strategic Studies, notes that the instruction is supposed to be rewritten every five years to keep it fresh, and now is probably the right time to start looking into that.

But, he added, “a lot of what she says she wants to do are things that sound very similar to my ear to what [Lord's predecessor] Frank Kendall was trying to do in the last rewrite. He tossed stuff out left and right, worked very hard to create the different models, put in extended discussions of different potential models of programs so that it would be obvious to people there's not one single way to do a program.”

Hunter is cautious when it comes to a massive shift in the 5000.02 system. “If you literally tell the system, ‘All the rules are repealed, go do everything you want,' the reaction won't be a sudden flood of creativity that astounds you with the amazing talent at the department, even though there is a lot of talent there," he said.

“What's more likely to happen is you have total paralysis because everyone is sitting around going: ‘Oh no, the rules are gone. How do we know what we can do? What do we do now?' But over time that might shake out.”

If Congress needs to get involved, Lord said, she's prepared to go to Capitol Hill “because I know they are partnering with us and they want to make sure we do things in a simpler, most cost-effective manner.”

2. Intellectual property rules: A long-standing fight between the department and industry is over who should own the intellectual property used by the American military. Before fully taking on 5000.02, Lord hopes to write a departmentwide intellectual property policy.

Lord pointed to the “very good job” done by the Army on creating an IP policy and said her goal is to build on that to create a standard across the DoD.

“From an industry perspective, we are trying to be consistent across all the services and agencies, so that we don't have different requirements for similar needs,” Lord said. “So intellectual property is a good example. We'd like to have the same kind of contract language that can be tailored to individual needs, but basically have consistent language.”

David Berteau, a former Pentagon official who is now the president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, noted it is hard to read the tea leaves for what Lord may be planning based on her public comments.

But he pointed out the long-standing challenge for the Pentagon — that nearly 70 percent of all program costs are life-cycle sustainment and maintenance costs — as a sign that something needs to change so the department can avoid major issues in the future.

Depending on how new rules are implemented, the use of IP might drive down costs — or, he warned, it might lead to companies unable to compete, forcing the Pentagon to pay more or be less prepared for challenges. Put plainly, Berteau said, “it's complicated.”

He hopes Lord will begin interacting with industry on this issue in ways similar to the current “listening tour” on changes to progress payments.

3. Better software development: It's become almost cliché that the department needs to do better at developing software, but in this case it's a cliché that experts, including Lord, agree with.

The Defense Innovation Board, a group of tech experts from outside the department, is working on a series of studies on software, including one focused on how to drive agile development techniques inside the building. Lord said to expect that report before the end of March, adding: “I think that will be important in terms of capturing a road map forward on how to do this correctly.”

4. Increase use of OTAs: In 2018, Lord's office released a handbook on when and how to use other transaction authorities — legal standards designed to speed acquisition that critics say are underutilized by the department. Lord called it “sort of a warmup” for creating more useful handbooks for the acquisition community, but said that the goal for 2019 is to get people to correctly employ OTAs.

“Usually they should be used when you don't have a clear requirement. So, true prototyping when you don't know what you're going to get,” Lord said. “Prototyping early on, probably before you get to the middle-tier acquisition.”

5. Greater use of prototyping: Speaking of which, Lord said the department has about 10 projects underway for rapid prototyping at the mid-tier level, with the goal of growing to about 50 in the next year. The goal is to take the systems into the field, test them out and then grow the next iteration of the capability based on what is learned.

“We're taking systems that are commercially available and perhaps need a little modification, or defense systems that need a modicum of modification to make them appropriate for the war fighter,” Lord said. “That's one of the authorities we are very appreciative for, and we will continue to refine the policy. I signed out very broad policy on that this year. We'll write the detailed policy coming up early next year.”

6. Making the Selected Acquisition Reports public again: Until recently, the department publicly released annual Selected Acquisition Reports for each of the major defense programs. Those reports can inform the public of where programs stand and the costs associated.

However, under the Trump administration, those reports have been largely classified as “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a higher level of security. Critics, including incoming House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., have argued there is no need for those once-public reports to be listed as FOUO. It appears Lord is working to open those back up.

“We're going to try to minimize the FOUO on that,” Lord said in response to a question about it. “There are certain information [issues] that we have to protect, but [we] understand the need, the requirement, and I will put our guidance to make everything open to the public to the degree we can.”

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/12/27/six-things-on-the-pentagons-2019-acquisition-reform-checklist/

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22 septembre 2020 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR

New US Army radios show anti-jam progress at network experiment
Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is seeing improvements in anti-jam capabilities in new radios crucial to securing manned-unmanned communications at its annual Network Modernization Experiment. At NetModX '20, which runs from late July to early October at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command's C5ISR Center — or Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Center — is testing the resiliency of the new radios. The effort will help the service observe how they would perform in the field as the Army looks to partner humans and machines. Initial data from the event suggests the two companies involved — Silvus and Persistent Systems — have improved their radio capabilities from last year, specifically in regard to anti-jam, according to Daniel Duvak, chief of the C5ISR Center's Radio Frequency Communications division. But one major challenge is making the radios less detectable as the Army's tactical network team starts to focus on command post survivability — or reducing the electromagnetic signature of command post communications — while not sacrificing latency and throughput. “If you want to make it less detectable, you know oftentimes you have to trade off the throughput or the range or one of those other products,” Duvak said. “So that's the piece and the real technical challenge that they're continuing to work on over the next few months. We've seen progress that they've made in those areas, but that's the piece that they're still working on.” Robert Stevens, an electronics engineer at the Radio Frequency Communications division, told C4ISRNET that the radios are an important piece of the next-generation combat vehicle. And Duvak said the Army's tactical network modernization team — made up of the Network Cross-Functional Team and Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical — wants to use the radios as a mid-tier radio solution. The development and fielding of new science and technology projects can take more than five years; however, the Army wants to speed that up as it seeks to modernize systems in preparation for future conflicts with near-peer adversaries. At last year's Network Modernization Experiment, the C5ISR Center tested several vendors' radios to see where commercial technology stood. Alternative contracting options, like broad agency announcements as well as cooperative research and development agreements, have proved critical to quickening radio development. Under the contracting mechanisms, vendors and the Army have more flexibility to experiment with radios and make iterative modifications as requirements change. Duvak said this is different from how the Army did business years ago, when it would award yearslong contracts but eventually receive radios that no longer met current requirements. “What we were able to do at this program was, in just about a year and a half of development time, take a couple of those products that we saw that were very promising and we were able to add and actually fund vendors to enhance those radios with those resiliency features that we were just talking about for the contested environment,” Duvak said. “Things like making them anti-jam, or more difficult for the adversary to jam, making them more difficult for the adversary to detect or intercept our communications.” Duvak said the Army wants the new radio capabilities for Capability Set '23, a collection of new tactical network tools to be fielded to soldiers in fiscal 2023. The resiliency of communications is critical as the tactical network modernization team pivots to reduce the electronic signature of the service's command post under Capability Set '23. The team is looking to increase bandwidth and reduce latency as part of that set of tools. Preliminary design review for Capability Set '23 is scheduled for April next year. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/09/21/new-us-army-radios-show-anti-jam-progress-at-network-experiment/
14 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

Lockheed: New Demand for F-16s Could Push Type Past 5,000 Mark
Sept. 11, 2020 | By John A. Tirpak After nearly shutting down production several times, Lockheed Martin is getting a surge of orders for the F-16. With a current backlog of 130 jets, and several countries on the cusp of making orders, the company sees a possibility of surpassing the 5,000th airplane of the type, Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President of Aeronautic Michele A. Evans said Sept. 9. “We're seeing a ... resurgence of the F-16 business,” Evans said in an interview with Air Force Magazine. The company is producing Block 70 Falcons for Bahrain, Bulgaria, and Slovakia at its Greenville, S.C., plant, where it moved the F-16 line last year, freeing up space at its Fort Worth, Texas, plant for the F-35 production line. “We're up to about 4,600 aircraft delivered and can see possibly getting up to 5,000,” Evans said. Production is ramping up to four aircraft a month at Greenville, which has increased its workforce to 400 employees, she noted. It is also operating under an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity Air Force contract to supply F-16s to Morocco and Taiwan and potential future or repeat customers. The IDIQ vehicle will streamline and speed up contracting so there is a “base configuration” of aircraft to be built, “and then we propose only the unique capabilities for each country,” in the form of specific sensors or capabilities, she said. “We then just negotiate that contract with those countries.” The backlog does not include India, where Lockheed is seeking a contract for an advanced version of the F-16 to be called the F-21. Along with partner Tata, Lockheed would build 114 airplanes in India, under license, if it wins the competition. The F-16 sales could also create future F-35 customers, Evans said. “For a lot of these countries, ... as we get them capable with the F-16, we believe the next step for many ... is future procurement of the F-35.” Evans said the U.S. Air Force is seeking more operational flight program and software updates for its own F-16s, and may be interested in other improvements as well. The Air Force is “looking to advance the capability” of its Falcons, she said. The current backlog will keep the F-16 in production through 2025, Evans noted, but Lockheed would consider increasing the rate of production if demand increases. Hitting 5,000 Falcons delivered would likely take more than seven years of sustained work, she said. However, “We don't see any issues in terms of being able to meet customer demand,” she added. Editor's Note: This story was updated at 9:41 a.m. Sept. 12 to include the correct number in the F-16 backlog. https://www.airforcemag.com/lockheed-new-demand-for-f-16s-could-push-type-past-5000-mark
29 mars 2019 | International, Terrestre

US Army cuts current vehicle fleet to make way for next-gen tech
By: Jen Judson Update: This story has been updated to reflect correct procurement numbers for the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV). WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has telegraphed its plans to terminate 93 programs and truncate another 93to make room for next-generation technology under ambitious and rapid modernization plans, and the first major programs to feel the ax blows in the next five years are vehicles in the current fleet. According to fiscal 2020 budget request documents released March 12, the service plans to cut back on upgrade plans for its Bradley Fighting Vehicle program, an aging platform in the fleet currently unable to effectively support technology like active protection systems. But the Army is also planning to cut not-so-legacy systems as well — the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV) built by BAE Systems and the Oshkosh-manufactured Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) — that recently replaced legacy systems, Army Comptroller Lt. Gen. Thomas Horlander said during a March 12 budget briefing with reporters at the Pentagon. The service has not reached a full-rate production decision for the JLTV. That was pushed back from December 2018 to May 2019 due to new plans to alter the vehicles — to include larger windows and the addition of a muffler — based on soldier feedback. And the first prototype for AMPV — the M113 personnel carrier replacement — rolled off the line in 2016. The budget documents lay out the Army's FY20 plans to cut Bradley A4 upgrade plans from 167 vehicles to 128. The plan is to procure five more sets of Bradley A4 vehicles with one going to pre-positioned stock in Europe and the other four replacing the oldest sets of Bradleys. Then the program will stop around 2023 to make way for the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle, or NGCV, according to Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army's G-8 chief. Although the Bradley will be curtailed, Pasquarette noted that its funding in FY20 was up 37 percent from last year at $639 million. While the Army — as of last year — planned to buy 3,035 JLTVs, it now plans to purchase just 2,530 of the vehicles in FY20. Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy told an audience at the McAleese & Associates and Credit Suisse Defense Programs conference in Washington on Wednesday that the service would stop at five brigades of Bradley A4 vehicles. That decision, he said, would sync with an investment increase for the NGCV expected in 2023 and beyond. And while the Army plans to decrease JLTV buys in 2020, cuts will likely not stop there. McCarthy said the Army is looking to lower the requirement for JLTVs and could soon be locking in a new top-line requirement number. Yet, Pasquarette also said at the McAleese conference that the top-line requirement would not change for the JLTV but would just be pushed to the right. McCarthy added that cutting the fleet of JLTVs was justified because the Army has a wealth of vehicles, from 55,000 Humvees, and 49,000 more JLTVs and another 800 Infantry Squad Vehicles planned. “We clearly have more capability than we need,” he said. The AMPV buy holds steady in FY20 at 131 vehicles. The FY19 plan shows the Army wanted to buy 130 vehicles. The five-year plan has yet to be released by the Army, but it's likely to show a decline in AMPV buys following FY20. Pasquarette said the AMPV top-line requirement remains unchanged, but the service was simply slowing the procurement rate per year. The cuts to current programs were made following painstaking deliberations among Army leadership over the course of last year in a forum dubbed “night court.” Through the process, the service measured current capability against its contribution to increasing capability in a modern, more lethal Army, and it terminated or truncated programs that didn't fit the bill. Pasquarette noted that the programs that were fully terminated were small ones that did not contribute to the lethality of the future force. Some of the bigger programs were slowed such as the vehicle programs. Overall, the Army moved an additional $3.6 billion into modernization funding accounts in FY20 over last year's levels — planning to spend $8.6 billion on programs that get after a more modern force. And across the five-year budget plan, the service moved an additional $32 billion to fund modernization efforts beyond what was planned in FY19 for a total of $57 billion. The Army isn't cutting or slowing all of its legacy vehicle systems, Pasquarette noted. The Stryker Double V-Hull (DVH-configuration combat vehicles) will get $550 million per year over the next five years to outfit a half of a Stryker brigade combat team annually. The Abrams tank will receive $1.7 billion in FY20 funding, a 64 percent increase over last year, Pasquarette added. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/federal-budget/2019/03/13/us-army-cuts-current-vehicle-fleet-to-make-way-for-next-gen-tech/

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