Agile Acquisition to Advance America’s Security
By Henry "Trey" Obering III
Executive Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton
The only way for the U.S. to meet the increasing array of future threats is to acquire and field superior capabilities in an agile and timely manner. A key
factor in accomplishing this is for the government to be a “smart buyer” by working collaboratively with industry and warfighters. A key “smart buyer” element is the understanding, integration and management of its acquisition program baselines (e.g. requirements, technical, test, schedule, cost, contractual, etc.).
Two years ago, I led an Air Force and National Academies study to analyze how the Air Force was “owning their programs’ technical baselines.” “Owning” was defined as Program Managers having sufficient technical knowledge of their development efforts to enable program success by making informed, timely, and independent cost, schedule, and performance risk decisions while ensuring disciplined program execution. Owning the technical baseline ensured government personnel understood user requirements, design selection criteria, and options to pursue alternatives given unanticipated cost, schedule, and performance challenges.
We found the Air Force relied too heavily on prime contractors and had lost the organic ability to perform independent technical analyses, validate contractor technical decisions/conclusions, and the ability to challenge cost conclusions. One reason was atrophy of their organic engineering workforce and ability to attract/retain engineering talent. Additionally, use of “lowest price technically acceptable” (LPTA) contracts for services to augment the government workforce exacerbated these issues.
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Helping the government to be a “smart buyer”
is a key element to ensure that we are doing
all that we can to acquire capabilities
to protect the homeland, deployed forces, our allies, and friends.
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So how can the government become a “smart buyer”? An important step is recognition that high-end technical talent is required on the government team to challenge or validate prime contractor conclusions, risk assessments, and costs. So instead of LPTA contractors, who often lack adequate technical capabilities, the government should use “highly technical affordable talent” as agents supporting them across the program life-cycle. This talent must be independent and free from Organizational Conflict of Interest and could be incentivized to promoting best of breed solution selection.
Contractors of this type and caliber could be used to define architectures, properly characterize technical challenges early in the development process, plan “knowledge points” to mitigate or retire risks, provide systems engineering trades, and perform studies and cost assessments insight/analysis, among other tasks. Proper use of technical agents could prevent downstream cost and schedule overruns when the government pays for a large prime contractor engineering “standing army” while solving technical challenges not properly characterized at the outset. While the initial cost of experienced and independent engineering support will certainly be higher than LPTA personnel, the return on investment is also much higher considering avoidance of the cost impacts, schedule delays, and warfighter frustration as programs timelines and deployment slips.
The U.S. must do all that it can to maintain our historic, superior military advantage especially with the emergence of near peer and peer threats. Helping the government to be a “smart buyer” is a key element to ensure that we are doing all that we can to acquire capabilities to protect the homeland, deployed forces, our allies, and friends.
Henry “Trey” Obering III is an Executive Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton. He is a retired lieutenant general of the United States Air Force. His last assignment prior to retirement was as Director of the Missile Defense Agency (2004-2008).
This article appeared in the Sounding Board feature of PSC's fall 2018 Service Contractor magazine. Click here to view the PDF article.