From the Editor-in-Chief Y
ears ago, when I was a communications director with a major defense firm, I remember a meeting where the president of my line of business was frus- trated with the status of major contracts. Te issue was the seemingly constant changes in requirements, cost and schedule. My boss at the time said, “If they would just tell us what they want, we can build anything!” And there’s the rub.
As you probably know, the government often isn’t familiar with all the capabilities available on the commercial market, as new technology and production processes are popping up all the time. Conversely, industry isn’t in the business of spending billions building weapon systems in the hope that the government will like them.
It’s the government’s job to identify what our Soldiers need to fight and win on the battlefield. However, like technology, the battlefield for national defense and what is needed to secure victory are ever-changing. With our old industrial-age acquisition process, the government can take two years or more just to develop the requirement, then another five years or so to field the system. By that time, the technology could easily be out of date. Tat, in turn, means that requirements, costs, performance and schedule have to change.
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Email Nelson McCouch III
ArmyALT@gmail.com
Now, layer on top of that the sometimes conflicting needs of industry to actually make a profit, and for the government to get a meaningful return on its investment of hard-earned taxpayer dollars, and you can see that acquisition is fraught with turmoil even on a good day.
In addition to streamlining our bureaucracy, for the Army to maximize its investments and provide meaningful materiel solutions to the warfighter, we need to better understand industry, its capabilities, market conditions and its key driver— profit! We need to make the acquisition process easier for them, and for us.
A critical task for the Army acquisition community is to communicate clearly with industry not only about our require- ments, but about its requirements, and to develop “a policy that carefully balances the goals of fostering private innovation with long-term sustainment considerations,” as the Hon. Dr. Bruce D. Jette, the Army acquisition executive, states in his column (“Intellectual Property Lines,” Page 6).
In a recent article on LinkedIn about game theory, author, educator and supply chain entrepreneur Kate Vitasek summed up the issue well: Te Army and its legions of contractors, she wrote, “must have a mutual commitment to each other— and each other’s success—over the long haul” to create win-win agreements.
How the Army tells industry “what we want” and creates win-win conditions is the focus of this issue. Read Dr. Jette’s column and learn about initiatives that he and the secretary of the Army are taking behalf of acquisition reform. Find out which companies are in the running to receive a $200,000 award by virtue of the innovative capabilities they can offer, as part of the Army’s Expeditionary Technology Search (“Innovation Countdown,” Page 46). Finally, gain insights about industry and government partnerships from senior executives at Accenture Federal Services, Bell, General Micro Systems and PacStar in our “Industry Insight” section, starting on Page 106.
As always, if you have ideas, comments or even an article you would think would be of interest to our readers and the acqui- sition community as a whole, please contact us at
armyalt@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you.
Nelson McCouch III Editor-in-Chief
HTTPS: / /
ASC.ARMY.MIL 5
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