HOW RELEVANT IS SPEED?
internet and GPS, for example—but the commercial marketplace now dominates technology. If our nation is to maintain the technological superiority needed by our Soldiers on the battlefield and the deterrence needed for diplomacy, we must capitalize on commercial advances.
Since the early 2018 release of NDS, the acquisition community has established as its primary objective the production of war-winning capabilities at the speed of relevance. Each of the military branches’ service acquisition executives have prior- itized speed. Dr. Bruce Jette, the former assistant secretary of the Army for acqui- sition, logistics and technology, has indicated that we must “maximize the use of law and policy in order to rapidly proto- type, produce and field products.”
ARMY LEADS WAY ON OTA
The Army remains the leader in other-transaction authority (OTA) usage across DOD. In the 2019 fiscal year, Army OTA obligations increased from $3.07 billion to $4.95 billion, a 61 percent increase. Army OTA obligations have increased 416 percent since fiscal year 2016. (Graphic by the Center for Strategic & International Studies)
that drives our acquisition priority from the early 2010s’ “better buying power” to today’s “speed of relevance.”
So, are we entering a new cold war? Perhaps, but this is not yesteryear’s Cold War. Our only interaction with Russia (still a challenging adversary) and its Warsaw Pact allies was government to government. We didn’t share much commerce. It was like two clenched fists bumping into each other as each country searched for the next technological breakthrough. Times have changed. Since what has been known as the “Last Supper,” in 1993, when then- Secretary of Defense Les Aspin advised the CEOs of our major defense industry part- ners to consolidate because there wouldn’t be a big enough defense budget to support them all, major defense companies have
86 Army AL&T Magazine Spring 2021
eroded from 107 at the end of the Cold War to just five by the late 1990s.
IS MORE BETTER? Yet is multiplying the number of defense industry companies the answer to our goals? No, probably not. Te world has changed and is more complex. Unlike two clenched fists, America and China have a much more complex relationship, tightly intertwined economically, while separated doctrinally. As Tomas Friedman notes in his book “Te World is Flat,” if Walmart were its own country, it’d be China’s eighth largest trading partner, surpassing Canada and Australia. Further complicating the scenario is that this global economic race now drives technology. It used to be that military technological advances drove overall technology advancement—the
Te Adaptive Acquisition Framework, described by the Honorable Ellen Lord, the former undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment (USD A&S), as “the most transformational acquisition policy change we’ve seen in decades,” was introduced to “enable innovative acquisi- tion approaches that deliver warfighting capability at the speed of relevance.” Te framework establishes multiple pathways to achieve that speed. In the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for the 2016 fiscal year, Congress autho- rized the use of middle tier of acquisition, designed to provide warfighters with new and proven innovative technologies within five years. In the 2020 NDAA, Congress authorized DOD to take advantage of agile commercial software development processes to quickly develop, field and continually upgrade software solutions. Even the stodgy, traditional pathway, now referred to as major-capability acquisition, with its five phases and multiple decision points, embraces as its first priority the “speed of delivery.”
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