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The past week has generated a series of actions aimed at ensuring the responsible development, use, and acquisition of artificial intelligence.
- President Biden released an executive order on AI, which establishes eight guiding principles and priorities to apply across government, industry, academia, and civil society. These priorities include safety, privacy, and protecting workers. Among the requirements listed are reports from companies "developing or demonstrating an intent to develop potential dual-use foundation models."
- OMB released a memorandum with draft implementation guidance for this EO that is open for public review. The guidance would establish AI governance structures in federal agencies, advance responsible AI innovation, increase transparency, protect federal workers, and manage risks from government uses of AI.
- DoD released its updated guidance for AI combined with its approach to managing data and analytics. The 2023 Data, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Adoption Strategy "orients the Department’s data, analytics, and AI adoption activities toward an ‘AI Hierarchy of Needs’, with quality data as its foundation, and a focus on speed, agility, learning, and responsibility."
- Two Senators introduced a bill to codify many of the features from the Executive Order into law.
- And the National Institute of Standard and Technology announced the creation of new center, the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.
Our top story gives an update on the Navy's acquisition status and priorities, as detailed in an interview with Jay Stefany, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. He discusses production priorities, compelling commercial technology, labor challenges, the F-35, and contracting initiatives.
Last week, GAO released its annual assessment of bid protests. After 3 years of declining, protests were up in 2023. As Frank Konkel's article points out, this is largely due to the 300 protests sustained against the Health and Human Services Department’s Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 — orCIO-SP4.
In other acquisition news, the Department of Homeland Security is moving out with its own cybersecurity metrics for contractors, opting against using DoD's CMMC program.
Stephen Losey's article on the supply chain for solid rocket motors provides a deep dive into a sector seeing increasing demand and that is currently serviced by only a handful of companies.
In Congress, three military nominees were finally confirmed yesterday: Adm. Lisa Franchetti as Chief of Naval Operations, Gen. David W. Allvin as Air Force chief of staff, and Lt. Gen. Christopher Mahoney as assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. As you no doubt know, Mahoney's confirmation is weighty, coming on the heels of Gen. Eric Smith, commandant of the Marine Corps, suffering a medical emergency speculated to be a heart attack.
Wednesday night, Republican Senators called 61 military nominees up for voice votes in an effort to move through Tuberville's blockade. Much to everyone's frustration, Tuberville voted against all 61 nominees. He now maintains he won't release his hold until Congress votes on DoD's policy to pay for travel costs associated with service members seeking abortions.
And in NPS news, we have a few success stories of current and former students. Alumna Mia Korngruen was recognized for her forward-looking use of emerging technologies, and naval aviators at Pensacola are earning stackable certificates at NPS while waiting for flight training.
It's November! Symposium proposals are due at the end of the month. Start writing now, and make plans to join us in May.
Symposium Call for Proposals Is Now Live!
We are accepting proposals for the 21st Annual Acquisition Research Symposium, to be held May 8-9, 2024.
This year our symposium takes up the theme of “Resourcing Innovation.” We are especially interested in papers that consider challenges and successes in providing the right resources – to include not just funding, but also people, training, acquisition authorities, time, supply chains, etc. – that can generate, transition, and deliver new warfighting capabilities and strategies.
As always, we welcome a wide range of papers sharing research of interest to the larger acquisition community.
Proposals are due by November 29, 2023.
This Week's Top Story
US Navy weapons buyer talks ship production, F-35 upgrade delays
Megan Eckstein, Defense News
Jay Stefany, the acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, sat down with Defense News to discuss what this focus on production looks like for the Navy, what the service’s contracting arm is up to, and more.
What contracting initiatives are on your plate?
One of the things that we started with under [former Navy acquisition chief Hondo] Geurts, and we’ve continued, is the idea that we would like to obligate more money each year with fewer contracting actions in order to free up time for our contracting officers and our program team to actually do more bigger-picture, strategic stuff, as opposed to the more transactional stuff.
This past year, $151 billion worth of obligations, which is the most we’ve ever done in contracting or obligating money. Contracting actions are getting lower and lower, and we’ve hit the lowest number of contracting actions [since this effort began in FY20] at 199,000. So the idea of more work done with fewer contracting actions — that’s one.
We’re also seeing a trend in the contracting officer world of higher attrition [than other parts of the workforce]. It’s a hard thing to do. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has encouraged us to look at ways to retain that workforce. It’s not so much recruiting them; it’s that once they get up to speed, it is just hard work, and we need to make opportunities for them to want to stay.
We also had a record year for small business contracting. So of the [small business-eligible portion of the total spending in FY23], $20 billion of that was direct to small business prime contractors.
And then there’s more innovative contracting, like other transaction authorities. [In FY22], we were at about a billion dollars of other transaction authorities. In FY23, we ended up at $2.7 billion. So a large increase in how much we are using — and a 59% increase in the actual number of OTAs.
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