Cutting contract documentation by 90+ percent

Here is Air Force general Chapman at a 1971 appropriations supplemental hearing with DepSecDef David Packard, asking for additional funds to do prototyping including funds for the lightweight fighter competition that resulted in the F-16 and F-18 aircraft:

We believe that our solicitation can be reduced to a Request for Proposal of about 25 pages compared to what we are doing today. We think the contractor response can be held to about 60 pages compared to what we have received today.

Chapman proposed cutting solicitations by about 90 percent and contractor responses by a whopping 97 percent! Unfortunately where that actually happened is the exception rather than the rule. The problem is likely not the contract process itself but all the planning and documentation around a program before it gets to the contract phase. Even for a prototype.

In the early 1970s, there still was a Milestone I (or Milestone A) decision that involved many dozens of offices. Once going through all that documentation, it’s hard to strip out the requirements from a contract and give freedom to product owners and design teams.

The lightweight fighter competition, resulting in the F-16 and F-18 for the Navy, was a very irregular program and perhaps had the opportunity to provide that freedom in the solution space — as evidenced by that it got initial funding from a supplemental rather than the traditional multi-year PPBS budget build process.

Here’s more from Chapman:

… In summary of this part then we think three- to five-man teams on each project working closely with the contractor, strongly supported by our inhouse laboratories and systems division, would compare very favorably with 50- to 250-man program offices that are in our full scale production…

 

Some of the principles that we have looked at, which we think are useful here, are to reduce the requirement for special reporting by the use of the contractor formatted data; to waive or set aside several hundred procedural policy regulations, manuals and directives that normally govern our full development, procedure; also to, in other cases, selectively apply but not contractually invoke some of these existing directives. Reporting of the program managers would be kept as simple and direct as possible and in terms of the split test program we are talking about the services and the contractor jointly performing this with the contractor retaining the right through his designers to make changes during that program.

What is old is new again. Not much different from many acquisition recommendations today.