“We really hadn’t had any significant R&D [research and development] funding or any terrain-shaping capability for deep [obstacles] in a long time,” Butler said. And funding is everything. “It’s been my experience … that it’s very difficult to lure industry to the table if there’s not a commitment by the government to do something,” Hall said.
Butler added, “We had a requirement on the shelf for dominating mobility through terrain-shaping effects.” Sud- denly it had very high-level attention and
“money became available in FY16 to begin the GLMR program,” with delivery of an initial operational capability set for 2025.
Tat proved to be a daunting timeline for such complex work, Butler said, because
“we haven’t been spending money on the deep part.” Rather than go through the efforts that might normally accompany a future Acquisition Category ID program, he said, “We have to go right to indus- try to get to those ideas,” which led to DOTC, the OTAs and, Butler said, the call to industry: “ ‘Hey, here’s our ICD [initial capabilities document] concepts and requirements, what do you have available in industry?’ ”
GLMR is still pre-milestone A, which means there is time to explore technologies and not get locked into requirements
that won’t work
for the long haul. OTAs provide the flexibility to get into a back- and-forth with industry
to look at
potential “ilities,” as Butler put it, or the “incorporation of all the system development considerations early and not just concept technologies. Tis is to ensure that we maximize life cycle affordability by considering systems logistics, supply chain, packaging, transportation, cybersecurity, training, demilitarization, etc.”
OTAs also allow for things to be done far more rapidly. “We were able within six months to get industry on contract,” Butler said. “Tey developed their concepts based on the requirement we wrote coming out of the Joint Terrain Shaping Working Group.”
OTAs also allow industry more involve- ment in developing realistic and workable requirements based not just on what the Army wants, but also on what industry can do—which the Army might not even be aware of yet.
To that end, Butler said, “We had a clas- sified briefing [to industry] up front, like,
‘Hey, here’s some of the challenges espe- cially from a cyber and EW [electronic warfare] standpoint,’ so that they could have their systems address some of it. But then they brought in their new ideas and technologies.”
CONCLUSION For Jerry Whiteside of Orbital ATK, which has done business with PEO Ammunition for many years, the classi- fied briefing and industry days showed that there was a lot that industry could do that government wasn’t aware of and
“had things that were very high on the risk register … technically very challenging [things], and within the first few months we demonstrated the ability to address probably the top three or four risks they had on their risk register.”
Whiteside said that Orbital ATK has found the more collaborative OTA environment to be a sharp contrast to handing industry a requirement that it may find overly prescriptive. Now, he said, “We are very clear that government is looking for industry to help them lead them, and ourselves—lead the product to as early a fielding as possible.”
It’s been appealing to collaborate “to develop those requirements, to develop what
the ultimate product will
look
like,” Whiteside said. For him and his team, that’s a “very positive business rela- tionship between the government and industry.”
Hammel, whose Fantastic Data has
done much of its work over the last two decades in a DARPA environment with even fewer restrictions than OTA, went a step further, expressing the sense that if competitors could work more closely, perhaps on subsets of the same problem, they might significantly speed the process of coming to the best solution and save the government
time and money. But
he acknowledged that the wall between competitors is understandable.
As potentially promising as that greater unity of effort sounds, the Army and DOD are not yet at that point with industry. But
as they look for more
diverse ideas and more sensible ways to acquire more strategically and promote innovation, it could evolve into yet a newer way of thinking.
For more information, go to https://www.
pica.army.mil/pmccs/AreaDenial/ Overview.html#nogo06.
MR. STEVE STARK is senior editor of Army AL&T magazine. He holds an M.A. in creative writing from Hollins University and a B.A. in English from George Mason University. In addition to more than two decades of editing and writing about the military, science and technology, he is, as Stephen Stark, the best-selling ghostwriter of several consumer health-oriented books and an award-winning novelist.
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