ACQUISITION AT SPEED
are often unintended consequences to every decision and this phased approach allows a community of experts to come together to see the impacts of each require- ment decision.
MATERIAL MATTERS
Maj. Matthew Burton, left, OMFV requirements officer at the Next-Generation Combat Vehicles Cross-Functional Team (NGCV CFT), and Sgt. 1st Class Salem Auclair, OMFV master gunner for the team, review materials related to the OMFV at the Detroit Arsenal on July 20. Burton and Auclair have both worked with the team for about two years. (Photo by the author)
“We acknowledge upfront that the Army doesn’t know everything. We know what a lot of the possibilities are, but we acknowl- edge that industry may know things upfront that we don’t know. What we didn’t want was to create a requirement that said the vehicle must be able to travel 42 miles per hour and then have Vendor X develop a proposal that exceeds all our expectations, but only goes 41 miles per hour and we automatically have to reject it. We wanted to create that trade space where we truly can create the best possible product and deliver it to the Soldiers in the field,” said Maj. Matthew Burton, OMFV requirements officer for the Next-Gener- ation Combat Vehicles Cross-Functional Team at Detroit Arsenal.
In this refinement phase, we did not attempt to assess which vendor design was best, or which would become the basis for the Army’s requirement. Instead, we used the opportunity to explore differ- ent approaches with vendors possessing expertise in the design, development and manufacturing of combat vehicles to better understand the trade-offs and feasi- bility parameters required to issue a later solicitation with confidence.
Te change to the Army’s approach also fundamentally changed the interaction with government and industry, in that the focus was the development of digital designs to inform requirement maturation. Vendors were no longer solely focused on compliance and winning a competition
but, rather, focused on aiding the produc- tion of a feasible list of requirements that increases the likelihood of a successfully executed OMFV program in the future.
Troughout the concept design phase, the vendors refined their approaches and collaborated with Army users and engi- neers, refining their design attributes to move closer to informing a feasible and acceptable range of OMFV requirements. Additionally, this phase provided a price- less opportunity for all parties to learn about the realm of the possible. Although the Army would love to have a vehicle with an infinite amount of capability for its Soldiers, it must be mindful that the more capability it adds, the heavier and more expensive the vehicle will be. Tere
GO AHEAD, BREAK IT Some six months after the government awarded five separate contracts, the Army took each vendor’s concept design, incor- porated them into the Army’s modeling and simulation tools, and brought in a group of infantry Soldiers to test them. Working at the Detroit Arsenal starting in January, the Soldiers spent two weeks interacting with each design, first in a virtual reality setting and then in a full- size mock-up of the crew compartments.
“As important as it was for the vendors to be able to talk to the Soldiers and hear their inputs, I think that was really second- ary to that touch point,” said Melissa Morgan, a mechanical engineer who serves as the test and evaluation advisor to the Next-Generation Combat Vehicles Cross- Functional Team. “What really came out of that experience was our ability to vali- date and stabilize the requirements we will
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