A NEW ERA OF ACQUISITION
accomplish, in a much more agile form,” Etherton said. “And honestly, I think that was the intent by Congress in creating some of these authorities.”
“I don’t think [JCIDS is] going away, I think it is shifting the default,” said Ward, the former Air Force procurement officer.
“One of the guiding principles with a lot of this is there’s more than one way to generate a requirement.”
AFC has a leading role to play in the new balancing act of rigor and agility, Dillard said. While the command’s mission extends well beyond experimentation with acquisition approaches other than traditional JCIDS capabil- ity-based assessments, Dillard sees AFC—particularly the cross-func- tional teams of representatives from all the organizations with a stake in the acquisition—as a major influ- ence in speeding up the process.
“AFC now is in the mix for coordi- nation all the way up [the chain of command], and hopefully for inte- gration across combat domains and functional areas,” Dillard said. “If it sounds nebulous and ambiguous, I believe it still very much is.”
“But the real issue is, OK, how do we take that information and move forward?”
OTAs currently focus on smaller-scale acquisitions. But in four or five years, with the OTA language that allows for production as part of the agreement, an OTA could very well give rise to an ACAT I program—once the expedited authority has made it past the learning curve, Etherton said.
Bureaucracy remains an ever-present threat to the Army’s newfound agility, however.
CONCLUSION As attractive as OTAs have become, there is concern that they might become an overused, knee-jerk “easy solution,” like new developments in contracting that have preceded them. OTAs are by no means a perfect solution, but they have proved their value as a way to expedite.
“Te good part about the OTA is that you essentially get to write nearly a commercial contract, whatever you want,” Jette said in the interview. “Te problem in that is it assumes you know how to write a commercial contract.”
“I think there’s always a danger of overcorrecting,” said Ward. “But I think the danger of overcorrecting is a lower risk than of main- taining the status quo. … Tis is not a zero-risk proposition. But it is a risk improvement strategy. It’s a risk mitigation strategy.”
And so the learning curve continues to take shape. “Are we going to make mistakes? Are we going to misuse [expedited authori- ties] or use them in areas where we probably shouldn’t? Tere’s no question in my mind that that will happen,” said Etherton.
16 Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2020
Te learning curve did not start in just the past few years, Dillard noted. For all the seeming novelty of OTAs, he said, “this agree- ment authority has actually been around since 1958 and is no panacea in itself. OTAs are not always faster and must still include the needed protections for the DOD that FAR-based contracts provide. Let’s not forget that the infamous Future Combat Systems program began with a $240 million OTA way back in 2002.”
Nonetheless, it is clear, Dillard said, that “this time, acquisition reform is working, at least in terms of real- izing results sooner. Now, those results may not be the 100 percent solution that was initially required or budgeted for. But the user has
a bigger vote than ever these days, and it is doing much to steer a very difficult vessel through the ocean of complexity that is acquisition.”
As Soloway sees it, the jury’s still out on whether the Army and the Pentagon are capable of substantive acquisition reform in the next two years. “Tis is a question that we have been asking for decades. And the answer remains the same: I don’t know.”
“If we can truly modernize the way we develop and train acquisi- tion professionals to align with the historically fast-paced nature of the marketplace and technology,” Soloway said, “what is now considered ‘expedited’ or ‘alternative’ can become part of the normal course of business.”
“If we don’t try some of these things, we’re never going to find out what works and what doesn’t work,” Etherton said. “I want to see people embrace the agility, embrace the speed, and just not have to pay a price for it later on in the process.
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