SHAPING ARMY ACQUISITION
organized the advisory group of compa- nies that donated funds for the project and is advising the researchers. “What we want to do is harness the intellectual talent around defense innovation, and figure out how to get more tech and prob- lem solving into the government,” Alex Gallo, Common Mission Project’s execu- tive director, said in a February interview with Army AL&T. Gallo previously was a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, and a staffer for the House Armed Services Committee.
TECH WHERE IT'S NEEDED Gallo, who is also a West Point graduate, looks back at his deployment to Iraq as an infantry officer in 2004 as an example of an acquisition process that had lost its way. “When we got to Kuwait, we got a ton of really interesting and cool equipment. My Soldiers and I, we had fun learning about it in the deserts of Kuwait. But when we went to Samarra, Iraq, and combat, all of that new equipment sat in our Connex [cargo container] for the entire year, because they were all solutions in search of problems. And they were not solutions to any of our problems.”
Te Common Mission Project is looking for problem-based solutions for defense acquisition. “We want a problem-based, disciplined and, yes, entrepreneur- ial framework,” using industry’s agile approach, Gallo said. “But it has to be within a disciplined framework. And it has to be a problem-based solution, because we could bring in a ton of emerging technol- ogy, and at a rapid pace, but they may not actually serve a warfighter need.”
McGinn started George Mason’s Center for Government Contracting in 2019. Taking advantage of its location—the university is a 35-minute drive from the Pentagon, depending on traffic (which
PHONE A FRIEND
Cadet Jay Yang, a member of the U.S. Military Academy class of 2020, speaks with an expert on the phone while taking notes during a Hacking for Defense course in July 2019. (Photo by Brandon O’Connor, U.S. Military Academy at West Point)
during pre-COVID times could be formi- dable)—the center seeks to fill a niche that no other university has filled—“the business of government and the overall ecosystem of government contracting,” as McGinn put it. “Tere’s no university really, as a research center, focused around the business of government and how the Department of Defense and other agen- cies work with companies. I saw that and it surprised me.”
CONCLUSION In a year, the acquisition playbook that the GMU study produces will aim to combine the best of commercial and defense inno- vation in a product that government professionals will find educating, infor- mative and full of practical approaches to innovative acquisition. Te playbook will be used for not only the benefit of the
students, but also the benefit of govern- ment, industry and academia.
“It's really about taking the tools that have been developed, in law and regulation and then policy, and helping the system move forward, because a lot of this is about changing culture,” McGinn said.
MICHAEL BOLD provides support to
contract the U.S. Army Acquisition
Support Center. He is a writer-editor for Network Runners Inc., with more than 30 years of editing experience at newspapers, including the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Te Sacramento Bee, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He holds a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri.
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