THE P(I)LOT TO KILL JCIDS
PUT ME IN, COACH
When Don Schlomer read Section 809 of the fiscal year 2021 NDAA and learned that Congress had ordered a report on JCIDS, he wanted to be involved. “I was in touch with the congressional personnel, trying to figure out, ‘Who are you assigning this to, so I can get with them to help them go down that path?’ Because the items that were listed in 809 were the same concerns I listed in my dissertation. So Congress is seeing the same thing I saw when I was doing the research.” Then, he said, “I finally tracked down a commander … from J-8R, who was the gatekeeper, the responsible party.” J-8 is the Joint Chiefs’ force structure, resources and assessment directorate, and J-8R is the requirements part of that. That commander was also the liaison with AIRC at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and it turned out that there was a small group that was developing a model that showed how slow JCIDS was and that, “Yes, in fact, this takes years to get through, and it doesn’t meet the need of the current pathways. It’s just bad,” Schlomer said.
Schlomer was introduced to co-authors Mo Mansouri, a teaching associ- ate professor and program lead for the systems engineering program at Stevens, and Dinesh Verma, the executive director of Stevens’ Systems Engineering Research Center. They were eager to have his participation in the project. “So I became a research scientist under the Stevens Institute of Technology,” Schlomer said. “I got an agreement from the legal here [at SOCOM] that it’s a not conflict of interest.” When the report was finished, Schlomer said, he “also briefed it to the different levels in Congress to explain that, yes, this is important. And I got everybody to agree that we need to, first of all, streamline the process, and then eventually redesign it. And that’s where we are today.”
Instead of the capability development document
(CDD) used by JCIDS,
SOCOM uses a mechanism called the “special operations rapid requirement document” (SORRD), pronounced “sword.” AFC developed the “abbrevi- ated capability-development document” (A-CDD) for validating prototype require- ments. Programs can swap the 45-page CDD for
the 10-page SORRD and
A-CDD. In these more streamlined docu- ments, document creators do not lay out key performance parameters. (See side- bar, “Killer KPPs,” Page 10.) Schlomer said that, unlike the 852-day average for JCIDS, a SORRD approval takes approx- imately 200 days. (See the graphic on pages 12 to 13, which details the best case scenario for SORRD at 185 days, which is five days shy of what JCIDS takes just to get started.)
Te SORRD, according to the AIRC report, is intended “for expedient approval that aligns with the middle-tier acquisi- tion (one of the six Adaptive Acquisition Framework pathways). Te SORRD has a 96-hour limit to be submitted for approval via the Special Operations Command Requirements Evaluation Board, which takes 30 days to validate the requirement.”
EXPONENTIAL GROWTH
JCIDS was born in 2003, and the original documentation was only 83 pages. Now, it’s 396 pages. (Photo by Pixabay, Pexels)
14
Army AL&T Magazine
Spring 2023
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132
