THE P(I)LOT TO KILL JCIDS
Before JCIDS began in 2003, the big services developed and validated their own requirements. But then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had begun looking for a more comprehensive way of developing capabilities jointly. Te original documenta- tion for JCIDS, Schlomer said, “was 83 pages back in 2003. Now it’s 396 pages. Why?” Not only that, AIRC found that the aver- age system takes 852 days to get through JCIDS, enough time that the technology would be obsolete. Tat 852 number repre- sents the time it takes to validate an initial capabilities document, then send the ensuing capabilities document through JCIDS and have the Joint Requirements Oversight Council sign off on it.
Today, the vast majority of acquisition programs have to go through the JCIDS process because every program has to be based on an actual need: the requirement. For most acquisition professionals, JCIDS is the way they know how to do it.
SENTIMENTS ALIGNING Congress and DOD agree that JCIDS needs to change, but neither has said exactly how it envisions the capability requirements- development process getting sensible speed, rigor, flexibility and efficiency. Tat is changing. In the National Defense Authoriza- tion Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2019, Congress directed DOD that the secretary of defense would establish extramural (inde- pendent) “acquisition innovation and research activities.”
Tus was AIRC born.
In turn, the AIRC report on JCIDS itself was born of the NDAA for the 2021 fiscal year, which directed DOD to “conduct an assessment of the processes for developing and approving capa- bility requirements for the acquisition programs of the [DOD]
KILLER KPPS
Now and again scandals over alleged fraud, waste and abuse at DOD streak across the headlines. Sometimes, they really are scandals. Others, maybe not. In 2018, Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, “These Toilet Seats Lids Aren't Gold-Plated, But They Cost $14,000: The Pentagon has to clean up its confusing and wasteful budget,” which decried DOD “paying $14,000 for
individual 3D printed
toilet seat lids and purchasing cups for $1,280 each.”
To people who know nothing about how acquisition works, that is scandalous. For those who understand acquisition, the real scandal is key performance parameters (KPPs). They’d ask, “What was the requirement?” Requirements often describe the needed capability in terms of KPPs, which dictate detailed specifications for the system under development. With Grassley’s $14,000 toilet seat, there may simply have been no other way to stay within the KPPs.
That doesn’t mean that Grassley was wrong to be outraged. But he just might have been outraged by the wrong thing.
KPPs, which may or may not have anything to do with interoperability, can force bad decisions, limit tradeoffs and seriously hamper innovation. Schlomer gave the example of the Personal Defense Weapon, which SOCOM was looking to develop. Starting in 2017, it undertook extensive market research. Finally last May, SOCOM found the weapon it wanted—one it had tried out four years earlier.
According to Schlomer, if the require- ment
for the Personal Defense
Weapon had a KPP of being 10 pounds 2 ounces, for example, that would stifle innovation. “Well, if it’s 10.4 pounds, yet it still allows the Soldier to maneu- ver over obstacles, to be able to carry it in the holster and all that other good stuff, why would you want to discard that weapon just because it’s two ounces more than the KPP? That’s
why you don’t want to say [the require- ment] that way. You want to say that the weapon needs to be able to be transported, needs to be able to allow the Soldier to maneuver these obsta- cles, needs to be able to fire at this speed with this accuracy and things like that.”
Conceptualizing prospective systems with KPPs can rule out something radically new. Schlomer said he’d heard that automobile pioneer Henry Ford said, if he’d asked his custom- ers, they’d have said that they wanted a faster horse, not a car. If the best replacement for a system is something wildly different from its predecessor as a car from a horse, it will be hard to predict. Said Schlomer, “You can’t really have a new weapon system that is radically different, that could do everything but was completely new” with KPPs.
10
Army AL&T Magazine
Spring 2023
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