My colleague James Hasik recently published his newest book, Securing the MRAP: Lessons Learned in Marketing and Military Procurement. In this episode of the Acquisition Talk podcast, we listen in on an excellent event hosted by the Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University. It starts with a conversation between Senior Fellows Stephanie Halcrow and James Hasik. Afterwards, Stephanie moderates a panel discussion with:
- Susan Alderson, the statistician who sparked the successful drive to adopt the MRAP in the Marine Corps
- Damon Walsh, a former MRAP marketing executive at Force Protection Inc.
- Paul Mann, the first MRAP program manager
The MRAP, of course, was an urgent program in the mid-to-late 2000s that addressed the IED threat. Basically, it is a ground vehicle with advanced suspension, greater ground clearance, a v-shaped hull, and kevlar panels that make it survivable against enemy IEDs. Even though the basic problem had been solved in South Africa many years before, the interesting part is how this solution was not immediately obvious given all the different ways you can defeat IEDs. Many different groups of people — some of which didn’t even know each other — contributed to the genesis of the MRAP program, and then rapid scaling to 5,000 vehicles in less than 19 months after the JUONS requirement.
It is truly an amazing story, and the event really brought out some great lessons learned:
- Interservice rivalry can incentivize adoption
- Don’t break too many rice bowls
- DoD must improve its market research capabilities
- Experiment and test before working on requirements
- Ignore those who say you’ll fail
- Negotiating with suppliers on a DX rated contract
Crash Programs
As Jim noted, one of the major lessons from MRAP is “not so much being able to forecast in advance what the surprise is going to be, but to build an organization that is robust in the face of surprise.” Certainly if that lessons were engrained in DoD acquisition, there would not be a multi-year requirements, budget, and acquisition process. Instead, starting with general requirements and honing those in as market research and technical trades are made is key. That swag at program requirements seems to have been at the root of MRAP, as Jim related:
Someone told me a story about, when Robert Gates, the defense secretary… asks the army chief at the time, “Hey the commandant of the Marine Corps wants to buy 3,500. How many do you need? And the chief, apparently it took him like three seconds to blurt out “10,000. That’s a number we can get behind and. I’m about three times the size of the Marine Corps. So I should have three times as many vehicles.” Okay. That’s about how the sales process went.
Paul Mann, the first MRAP program manager, commented how “We built ourselves a place where industry could come in and test their products ahead of that whole long JCIDS process.” In his first week on the job, they put solicitations out, both sole source and competitive, and finished the source selection in less than three months. Nine IDIQs were awarded that paved the way for the next seven years of the program.
The speed and irregularity of the MRAP program ultimately led to success, but it required direct intervention from top leadership. Jim noted that “somebody joked to me once that this thing worked because you made the SecDef the program manager.” So while MRAP is a very interesting case study in a crash program caused by surprise, its lessons may not translate to innovation at scale in DoD. Not every program can be the Department’s number one DX rated priority.
DX Rating
By the way, the DX rating allows government to divert suppliers productive capital to give priority to the DoD order over all other customers. Damon Walsh on the industry side gave an interesting story where he located one of the supply chain bottlenecks: tapered roller bearings from Timken. The program needed 5,000 vehicles worth of bearings, and Timken was primarily a commercial industry supplier and pushed back on conversion to meet the surge. Here’s Damon:
I said, “Listen, I talked to a guy named Paul Mann at DOD every day. He’s telling me that there’s a likelihood, this is going to get a DX rating, which means all of your production is going to go to us.” And he said hold on a minute. And then we started working out the supply chain.
I think this is an interesting story because the DX rating gave the program and its contractors leverage over the supply chain, but it didn’t lead to commandeering their production lines. Instead, a voluntarily negotiated agreement was struck that preserved the interests of government and the commercial contractor. That seems to be a best practice, that both sides need to be flexible and only use DPA authorities as a last resort.
Innovation Base
Here’s an interesting aspect of supplier relationships when the small company has the innovation but the big company has the production base and capital. Damon Walsh said:
At one point, we formed a joint venture with General Dynamics, which was akin to a pony express rider latching on to an elephant and then trying to steer the whole. They were so good at doing things that we weren’t. And we were so good at doing things they weren’t. And through a financial challenge, GD eventually wound up buying Force Protection. And from my perspective Force Protection disappeared, the spirit of the company is gone. GD would disagree with me, but that’s my view from my fox hole.
And here is Susan Alderson, “mother” of the MRAP, providing some great wisdom:
I totally agree with Damon that the small companies come up with great ideas. That’s usually why they spin off from big companies, they want to go in a specific direction, and we really need to figure out how to open the doors for them to come and talk to them and to free up money.
We need to have same-year money unprogrammed from where it’s supposed to go to free it up to really take advantage of a good idea in the time that it’s being created. To have to wait four or five years to get it POMed is a difficult decision. So somehow there has to be money available to people to really advance that spot on, good idea when it comes up somewhere. And I wish I had a solution. If we knew how to get across that valley [of death], we’d all be in a lot of different jobs.
Have to agree with that statement and give a call out to #PPBEreform! I’d like to have Jim Hasik for writing an excellent book and putting on this great even with Stephanie Halcrow, Paul Mann, Susan Alderson, and Damon Walsh. You can watch the video here. You can order Jim’s book, Securing the MRAP, here. And you can follow Jim’s blog at the Defense Industrialist.
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