Acquisition headlines (1/17 - 1/23/2021)

Top DoD weapons buyer: How the Pentagon transformed its approach to information-age warfare. (Business Insider) “People, however, are the most important aspect of this revolution. No policy change, technology offering, or amount of funding can substitute for our workforce.”

Will Roper to whoever replaces him at Air Force: Stay agile. (Fed Scoop) “… acquisition chiefs should be more like him, with deep technology expertise that extends to modern software development. Just being an expert in contracting or procurement isn’t enough, Roper said.”

New Will Roper paper: Bending the Spoon. He provides a vision where huge permutations of designs can be run through digital engineering. The very best could then reliably transition into a production environment, with first unit costs that would normally not be seen until the program was well down the learning curve.

PEO Ships preparing to usher in several new ship classes. (USNI News) Includes a new light amphibious warship (to start construction in 2023), a new destroyer to start in 2028, and then a next-generation logistics ship, an oceanographic survey ship, and multi-purpose common hull auxiliary multi-mission platform.

DOD Valley of Death: Closing the Two Year Gap. (Medium) “The customer would like to deploy our Sentry Towers to dozens more installations. Only it cannot. Despite the will and best efforts of our customer champions, the DoD budget process is too inflexible to accommodate in-year purchases of new technologies, even those that meet validated requirements.”

Outstanding outcomes in megaprojects. (Archipelago) “Oxford’s Bent Flyvberg recently shared a working paper about success factors in megaprojects. In it, he presented two: speed and modularity. These success factors were, “borrowed from Silicon Valley”, and he argued that organizations should incorporate them into their megaprojects.”

U.S. Air Force Talks New F-16 Orders In Latest Acquisition Shake-Up. (Aviation Week) Didn’t see this coming: “U.S. Air Force officials are talking about ordering new Lockheed Martin F-16s two decades after signing the last production contract. A review of the tactical aircraft portfolio now underway is set to deliver another Air Force acquisition shake-up in the fiscal 2023 budget request, with F-16s.”

DISA’s first-ever production OTA eliminated $300M in future costs. (Federal News Network) “… the OTA was key,” he said. “Without that, we would have written a set of requirements that likely, once it all played out, wouldn’t have been exactly what we want wanted.”

Elon Musk’s 6 rules of productivity show a divide between military and civilian workplaces. (Military) No large meetings, no long meetings, don’t be afraid to leave, don’t use acronyms, communication is not subject to chain of command, use common sense.

US War surge production too slow, CSIS Finds. (Breaking Defense) “On average, it would take 8.4 years to replace current inventories. This varied by industrial area with a low of 2.3 years for mission support activities to 20+ years for ships.”

Loyal Wingman. (Navy Matters) “… in our pursuit of technology as the magical solution to all our problems, we’ve latched on to this wingman concept and jumped right over validation and straight into implementation. We’ve got to learn some lessons from our past failures and start asking questions before it’s too late.”

5th generation air battle management. (Mitchell Aerospace) “Underpinning modernization efforts is the shared recognition that success in the future battlespace depends foremost on the speed and integration of information.”

Final design and technical review of future Constellation-class FFG-62 frigate for US Navy. (Navy Recognition) “… will be armed with one Mk 110 57mm naval gun, 32 Mk 41 VLS (Vertical Launching System), 16 NSM Naval Strike anti-ship Missiles, one Mk 49 RAM surface-to-air missile system, and four Mk 53 MOD 9 DLSs (Decoy Launching Systems).”