ARMY AL&T
ON CONTRACTING THE LURE OF URGENCY In defense acquisition, you can’t always get what you want. by Dennis P. Longo
Te seventh and final article in the On Contracting series, based on the Competition in Army Contracting course devel- oped by the author for the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement.
was an urgency to obtain goods and services immediately to sustain successful military operations. W
We’ve been in wartime mode since the turn of the century, and that urgency mantra continues to ripple through- out Army acquisition. Labeling procurement requirements as urgent seems to be the “usual” practice in our current high-paced era of increasing international conflicts and emerging threats. It seems that, no matter what the envi- ronment, no contract action may be set aside for another day irrespective of your workload or those meetings and conferences you have scheduled.
Ask the requiring activity or program manager if the request for a sole-source contract action that he or she submit- ted today may be delayed for a few days and the answer without hesitation will be an unconditional “No.” Tat may, perhaps, be for good reason. But federal procurement regulations are intended to limit competition based on unusual urgency, not on usual urgency.
When the urgency of a procurement requirement results in a decision to restrict full and open competition to one or a limited number of sources, that urgency must be “unusual” and not merely pose a risk of an unacceptable delay. Te urgency must be so unusual, in fact, that the government is compelled to take the extraordinary action to limit competition simply because there’s not enough time to solicit and award a contract for the requirement using normal competitive procedures.
https://asc.ar my.mil 73
hile on deployment in 2003, my commander told me more than once with regard to procurement requirements, “It got here yesterday, you work on it today, and you get it here tomorrow.” In other words, we received the procurement requirement yesterday, you work on the procurement require- ment today, and you get the items here tomorrow. Te focus of our procurement efforts in theater
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