Out with the heel-to-toe acquisition process, in with DevOps

We realized it was time to stop the heel-to-toe acquisition process of developing a concept and then going to Combats Development to develop a requirement, that then led to S&T [Science and Technology] activity, that then led to materiel acquisition, and then finally got to a point where you got to a test, and that might be the first time you hand it off to a soldier and found out what they could do with it, or not do with it.

 

So what we attempted to do here was we started to look at a partnership with our Combat Development brothers and sisters down in Ft. Gordon and throughout TRADOC [Training and Doctrine Command], and now Future Concepts Center as part of AFC [Army Futures Command], is how do we bring together in a collaborative-cooperative way he combat developers, the materiel developers, the technology developers, and the operators. How do we do this in such a synergy that everybody has equities and learning objectives?

That was Dr. Richard Wittstruck, associate director of field based experimentation and integration for the CCDC C5ISR Center, on the CCDC’s In The Lab podcast, “Cyber Blitz 2019: Shaping Information Warfare and MultiDomain Operations.”

In other words, how do we get out of the linear “requirements-pull” process of technology development which has reigned since at least 1961 when Robert McNamara took the helm of the DOD, to a more non-linear interaction between “technology-push” and “requirements-pull” which can be referred to as DevOps in the modern lingo. It’s good to hear leadership talking this way. I wonder whether there are simply structural problems to the defense acquisition process which make such a change unlikely. I often point to the budget process as one key impediment.

Another interesting part was how Colonel Eric Aslakson mentioned how it is important to get prototype or “surrogate” systems in operators hands early and then get quick feedback to developers. I never heard surrogate used in this context, but seems to make perfect sense for using some existing platform and rapidly integrate some commercial-off-the-shelf or other prototype to get it into operations and determine user needs and modification requirements.