Day 1 of Acquisition Research Symposium: Highlights
 Greetings ARP friends! We’re sending a special update recapping yesterday’s symposium highlights. Many of you joined us virtually and contributed to the robust conversations that remained lively over 13 panels. For those who didn’t join, this update gets you up to speed on some of what you missed, with a focus on our first two sessions. We’ll send another recap tomorrow, and then our mailings will subside back to our weekly Friday newsletters.
Hon. Andrew Hunter on the value of acquisition research, Air Force operational imperatives, digital acquisition, and middle tier acquisition programs
The morning began with keynote speaker, the Honorable Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, & Logistics. Mr. Hunter is a long-time friend of the symposium and of ARP, making his kickoff especially warm and informative for our audience. His remarks hit on a number of themes that came out throughout the day.
We humbly agree with Hunter’s assessment of this event, which he called “the premier forum for understanding, discussing, and planning acquisition research and for exchanging ideas about acquisition. I’m hopeful that this research program, which is outstanding and has been for many years, can continue and also will grow and resume some of the research approaches we were able to accomplish over the last decade—which have been a little hard to do in the last couple of year, in some cases due to funding limitations.” We hope so too.
Air Force Priorities and Divestments
Hunter noted that Secretary Frank Kendall has given a mandate to accelerate delivery of capability to the warfighter. But this mandate is challenging given the competition for resources between legacy platforms and new systems. He touched on the Air Force’s need to divest legacy platforms, which has been loudly resisted by leaders in Congress, and added that divestment is not all about financial constraints.
“Just as significant as the dollars that are tied up in our aging platforms are our aircrew and maintainers who operate those systems and are not available to help us deliver more modern systems. … In many cases it’s the people resources and the organizational resources we need to shift in addition to budgetary resources.”
Seven Operational Imperatives
Hunter reinforced Secretary Kendall’s seven key operational imperatives, which are driving the Air Force acquisition system and are being worked in collaboration with service chiefs for the Air Force and Space Force. They are:
- Defining Resilient and Effective Space Order of Battle and Architectures;
- Achieving Operationally Optimized Advanced Battle Management Systems (ABMS) / Air Force Joint All-Domain Command & Control (AF JADC2);
- Defining the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) System-of-Systems;
- Achieving Moving Target Engagement at Scale in a Challenging Operational Environment;
- Defining optimized resilient basing, sustainment, and communications in a contested environment;
- Defining the B-21 Long Range Strike Family-of-Systems;
- Readiness of the Department of the Air Force to transition to a wartime posture against a peer competitor.
Digital Acquisition
Hunter shared thoughts on the value of digital acquisition as the tool that will “enable rapid technology insertion into our fielded systems.” He gave the example of the communications node on the KC-46 platform that will enable the Advanced Battle Management System.
Other benefits of digital acquisition include lower costs and the ability to modify or iterate designs to address emerging operational problems.
Hunter shared that the Air Force is updating its acquisition policy and guidance, as well as education and training, to expand digital engineering capability. He also mentioned the Air Force’s recent establishment of a digital campaign and the digital transformation office launched last June.
He identified an area where researchers can help: “sticky issues like intellectual property that inevitably arise as chief concerns in digital acquisition.” He went on: “In many ways I see digital acquisition as a way to empower us to effectively wrestle with those issues early in the program lifecycle. Our research partners and academic partners can greatly facilitate our ability to accomplish that objective.”
During Q&A, Hunter distinguished between digital acquisition and digital engineering, focusing on the need for digital processes, not just tools: “Digital acquisition is about organizing and training and equipping the acquisition system and the enterprise to enable effective acquisition of digitally intensive systems. Digital engineering is about using digital tools to accomplish the systems engineering tasks and … production engineering tasks that we’ve always had.”
For those interested in hearing the latest research on digital engineering, check out panel 25, “Digital Engineering Across the Acquisition Lifecycle,” today at 1:55pm PT.
Middle Tier Authority Programs
Hunter mentioned that the Air Force has been an “early embracer” of middle tier authority, but the numbers are still small comparatively. The service has 44 programs using the middle tier pathway, and over 400 major capability programs.
He shared an example of a program using digital engineering and middle tier: the B-52 engine replacement program. (During Q&A, VADM Lewis shared that his mother worked as a “computer” with engineers on the B-52.) Digital engineering has been critical to the effort’s necessary and significant changes to the internal aircraft systems. As Hunter said, “It’s allowed us to create a digital twin of one of the oldest aircraft in the Air Force.” This digital engineering work has gone through “a virtual prototyping MTA program, which we anticipate will then feed into a major capability acquisition program to field and do the production work of installing the engines and making the modifications to the aircraft down the road.”
Plenary Panel 1: New Priorities, Familiar Challenges: Defense Trends in Budgets, Appropriations, and Contract Obligations
David Berteau is another long-time friend of the program. During his opening remarks, he thanked and paid a brief tribute to our founding chair, RADM (Ret.) Jim Greene, who remains passionate about this event and the importance of acquisition research.
Moving on to the topic of financial trends, Berteau provided an overview of defense budgets over the past decade, noting the shift when budget caps were no longer in effect, and breaking recent years down by types of contract obligations. He pointed out, as did other panelists, the negative effect of continuing resolutions on budget certainty and consistency over time. His prediction for FY23: numbers will be higher than they are now, but if there’s a continuing resolution (nearly certain), they will stay at today’s lower numbers.
Berteau also talked about presidential actions that have created more overhead for defense contracts, identifying 88 executive orders issued to date by President Biden. “All of these Executive Orders have a clause on changes to be made in FAR that will drive changes in contracts and contract behavior”—a notable increase in the use of presidential actions to drive contracting changes.
David Norquist talked about budgets from a strategy perspective and the return to a focus on high-end war. Some of his points:
- It’s a very different place from the cold war when the US economy was much larger. Our GDP is more similar to China’s.
- We have agreement across time about priorities, such as the latest list of critical technologies issued by Heidi Shyu’s office. This consistency is reassuring.
- We’ve had large RDTE budgets faced with choices: near term and long term. This shows up in the debate over divestment.
Shannon Hines picked up the topics of continuing resolutions and divestments. On divestments, she noted that we’re not willing to invest in maintaining legacy systems. Even when DoD is transitioning out a legacy system, we still need to plan how to maintain existing systems you know you’ll need for next 10-15 years until new system comes along. That’s where the conversation about supply chain comes in. When you shut down production chains, it’s expensive to turn them back on. There should be more discussion on this if we want to onshore and maintain the defense industrial base.
Eric Chewning kicked off his remarks by identifying two elements of demand signaling between DoD and industry:
- DoD’s demand signal for the type of technology or solution that it wants to buy.
- Implied production capacity industry needs to meet that demand.
Collectively, he says, we’ve spent a lot of time on that first signal, not enough time on the second, capacity. DoD has asked industry to find ways to cut costs, but that’s left us with a defense industrial base that’s not capacitized for high intensity conflicts. His suggestion: DOD and industry need to partner much better around the integration of warplanning and industrial capacity planning.
Finally, one highlight from Panel 11 on the Adaptive Acquisition Framework. Presenters discussed how research on programs using Middle Tier and Software Acquisition Pathways have met --or not met-- the goals of an agile acquisition system. David Tate of Institute for Defense Analyses shared his findings on the software acquisition pathway's requirement that programs have “valid operational software within 1 year from start of funding.” He asks, what can you develop in 47 weeks? The answer is you can produce about 28,000 lines of code--much less than what most programs require. Given this data, he suggests that software should start on the Middle Tier pathway, then transition to software pathway when within one year of completing. We see a theme of programs moving between different pathways based on where they are in their lifecycle and technology maturation, returning to Mr. Hunter's opening remarks on the B-52 engine.
We hope these bullets give you a reminder (or glimpse) of the day’s events, noting that we have neglected to mention many wonderful presenters and only glossed a few points from the sessions summarized here.
Recording of today’s keynote and plenary panel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L_wWUIpt_U
Over the next few months, we’ll share other panels on our ARP YouTube channel.
See you soon!
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