THE NEED FOR SPEED
MIDDLE-TIER ACQUISITION DOES HAVE RULES
1. Stakeholder members of a middle-tier acquisition program are established under a cross-functional team for the purpose of considering innovative technologies and new capabilities to meet the needs established by combatant commanders or acquisition executives. The stakeholders come from the areas of program management, contracting, testing, finance, science and technology, and logistics. (See Figure 1.)
2. A middle-tier acquisition process requires a validated requirement to request and thus expense funds within the process.
3. The members of a program that uses a middle-tier acquisition process must demonstrate the ability to evaluate the performance of a fielded prototype in an operational environment.
4. Members of the program must provide a path to
transition a successful prototype to an approved PM for production and fielding within five years using a middle-tier acquisition process or a traditional acqui- sition system.
5. A middle-tier acquisition process requires the team members to report the ongoing efforts of the proto- type development.
Reporting requirements are:
1. Name of the program: Personal Defense Weapon. 2. Capability gap or issue: Lighter weight and subsonic.
3. Definitive source of the gap or issue: National Defense Strategy.
4. Capability characteristics or solution: New weapon and suppressor.
5. Date funds approved for the validated requirement: Nov. 12, 2018.
6. Funding source: Procurement.
7. Program status or recommendation: Prototype assessment.
8. Date of prototype transition or termination: June 2020. 9. Reason for transition or termination: TBD. 10. Amount of the proposed budget: $5 million.
11. Suggested vendor of the prototype or production vendor: TBD.
So, what is middle-tier acquisition authority? It was introduced under Section 804 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2016, Public Law 114-92. Tis authority provides program managers (PMs) a means to use an existing need to rapidly assess advanced technological prototypes without the bureaucracy and restrictions of new requirements approval, or to rapidly field mature systems based on existing requirements of any form. While it doesn’t throw out DOD Instruction 5000.02,
“Operation of the Defense Acquisition System,” it encourages a minimalist approach to program structure and oversight.
Mid-tier acquisition is a powerful mechanism because it allows you to “soft-start” a new program or rapidly advance an existing one by initiating a rapid prototyping effort. A program manager (PM) can acquire several prototypes for user assessment during the requirements development and maturation process, essentially allowing the users to “buy, try and then decide.” Te obvious advantages of prototyping early in the process, before a require- ment is finalized, are many:
• The user community can see what the actual state of indus- try is, not just what is stated by our congressional leaders in Washington.
• Users can begin to make mission trade-offs and evaluate the relative priority of each aspect of a capability.
• Industry partners can receive essential feedback much earlier in the process—when the cost of changes is much lower.
If the prototype does not meet the user’s need, the PM can scrap it and try another one. Trough testing and evaluating proto- type alternatives, the PM can ensure that the user is not forced to take something that does not meet the need, as sometimes happens under today’s bureaucratic, momentum-based systems— for example, a Navy work uniform that’s not designed for use aboard ships.
All you need to use middle-tier acquisition authority is a service acquisition executive’s delegation of the authority for either rapid prototyping or rapid fielding. Both authorities are dele- gated based on any type of need or justification or requirement, be it a capabilities development document, a joint urgent opera- tional needs statement, an operational need statement, an urgent need statement or a directed requirement. Te ability to address one of these documents and bypass the need to get a require- ment approved through the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, paired with the exceptionally slim docu- mentation required for program structure, is the essence and value of middle-tier acquisition.
34 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2019
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