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Happy Friday!
This week the NDIA Emerging Technologies conference generated a lot of news.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks took the stage to talk about Replicator successes and announce the publication of the innovation factsheet, showing what's been accomplished over the past three and a half years. Some highlights:
- "Today, over 200 programs have used Middle-Tier and Software Acquisition pathways, with $57 billion flowing through them since inception — nearly 40 percent just in fiscal ‘24. In some cases, they're shaving up to six years off delivery timelines. And since January 2021, we've obligated $44 billion with OTAs, 61 percent more than at this point in the last administration. Production's share of that total grew over 12-fold compared to four years ago. That's real change."
- And she detailed how Replicator's successes to date have occurred by transforming processes that used to occur serially into a parallel process usually achieved by a collaborative meeting that gets the major stakeholders together to make decisions in real time.
- The result: "what we've done in under 12 months can [otherwise] take seven-to-ten years for similar-sized capabilities. And that should be truly mind-blowing."
Bill LaPlante also spoke at the event, where he announced the new Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience (PIPIR).
- He also released an editorial detailing successes of the Competitive Advantage Pathfinders as an approach that tackles the "iron triangle" of requirements, acquisition, and budgeting and has cut time to fielding new capabilities, especially for CJADC2. "A crucial advantage of CAPs is to adapt a technology capability used by one service and migrate it to another service without requiring a new program or budget cycle."
- Two examples from the op-ed: "CAPs enabled the Air Force to go from identifying operational need to developing a capability solution available for procurement within 18 months — a process usually taking several years for a new program. Additionally, a similar electronic warfare pathfinder has enabled the Army to potentially skip the development stage by leveraging a pre-existing Navy capability with minimal hardware and software changes."
Defense News released its annual assessment of the Top 100 global defense contractors.
- U.S. firms make up 48 of the 100 companies listed. Global revenue on defense has increased over the past year, driven by wars in Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, as well as efforts to bolster security in the Indo-Pacific.
In Congress news, the defense spending bill passed by the Senate last week has some notable nuggets: an additional $1 billion for Virginia-class submarines, and a rebuke of the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) program championed by Heidi Shyu for not delivering capabilities fast enough.
In her remarks at the NDIA conference, Shyu repeated her talking point that the program has received a fraction of its promised funding as a result of continuing resolutions and other budget delays.
- She also listed some of the program's successes, which are fielding joint capabilities the services won't invest in. Two of the four programs can be discussed at an unclassified level: a high-altitude balloon used for ISR and one that “helped the Marines to integrate a bunch of sensors” and reduce delivery time by four years.
Congress is on recess until September 9, when it returns for a scant three weeks before breaking again to campaign.
- Members won't be back at work until after election day, meaning we're already guaranteed a continuing resolution for the beginning of FY2025.
In ARP and NPS news, we're celebrating two student success stories: upcoming graduate Lt. Cmdr. Adam Johnson shares thoughts on research and collaboration in a profile from the NPS Foundation & Alumni Association, and former USMC student Timothy Socha's 2023 research on the Airlander hybrid aircraft has transformed into a funded contract exploring future use cases for a modified version of the craft.
Come work with us!
The Department of Defense Management (DDM) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is looking to hire one full-time faculty member specializing in program management. Duty location of Monterey, CA.
Applications due as soon as possible. Start date: October 1, 2024.
Learn more and apply now!
This Week's Top Story
COMMENTARY: Breaking Out of Acquisition’s ‘Iron Triangle’
Dr. William LaPlante, Breaking Defense
When it comes to the global competition for defense technology superiority, the advantage goes not to the one who does something perfectly, but to who does it first. Indeed, the lack of speed — resulting from self-imposed ponderous, belabored and often unneeded internal processes — has been an underlying weakness of a U.S. defense modernization enterprise that otherwise produces the world’s most advanced and capable weapons systems. ...
Recognizing the scope and urgency of today’s security environment, the department in 2022 began an initiative to effectively take what is a sequential process for onboarding new military capabilities and make it more simultaneous. The name given was Competitive Advantage Pathfinders, or CAPs. Webster’s definition of pathfinder, appropriately enough, is “one who discovers the way.”
The CAPs effort is run from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment in a newly created Acquisition Integration and Interoperability Office. The goal is to flip the equation on process improvement: identify technology potentially useful to multiple military services stuck somewhere in or among the stool/triangle’s three legs.
In other words, where is the bend in the garden hose preventing water from coming out the other end. The Acquisition Integration and Interoperability Office’s role is to institutionalize the CAP-derived solutions by facilitating collaboration, removing process barriers, then validating and disseminating the lessons learned for use in program offices across the department.
CAPs work by getting representatives — and buy-in — from the resources, requirements and acquisition communities (the legs of the stool/triangle) together to address whatever might be the cause of the delay, be it funding, contract rules or inter-service concurrence. Having resolved one issue, they move onto the next challenge. In all, CAPs can accelerate a specific technology or align requirements, budgeting and acquisition processes to deliver needed capability faster (speed) and, as importantly, into production at a high rate (scale). The valley of death is effectively bridged, if not vaulted in the process.
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