Acquisition Pros: Are You Prepared for War?
Can You Surge and Accelerate if Necessary?
Imagine you wake up one morning in the not too distant future, hop on your phone, and read that China overnight launched a series of attacks on Taiwan. In addition, China attacked U.S. bases in Japan, Guam, and Hawaii with volleys of missile and cyber attacks. While the damage is still being assessed, one thing is clear -
We are now at war with China.
You throw on your uniform, kiss your spouse and kids, and head into the office early. You’re a program manager for one of DoD’s hundreds of weapon systems. You get a call from the Pentagon. DoD leaders determined your program is one of a priority set of capabilities deemed critical to combat China.
Your orders are to develop a plan to accelerate deliveries ASAP to INDOPACOM. Schedule is now your #1 priority. Expect Congress to appropriate hundreds of billions in additional funding to the DoD, which your program can tap.
Upon hanging up the phone, you assemble your leadership team in the conference room and relay the orders.
“But we’re not scheduled for IOC until 2030!” exclaims one major.
“Copy that major. That was yesterday’s plan. Today we need to crash the schedule, and then accelerate it even more,” you reply.
Acquisition professionals: Have you looked at your programs and thought what you would do in this situation?
What would you need to do to accelerate capability deliveries to the Warfighters by years? What are the biggest schedule drivers? What activities could you do in parallel? What activities can we accept risk and do in a fraction of the time?
While many programs have requirements documents with key performance parameters and key system attributes defined, if it hit the fan, where is the real performance trade space?
Have you had discussions with your operational sponsor who manages the requirements to walk through notional scenarios? Based on technology maturity and performance levels to date, what is “good enough”? Where can we accept a 50-70% solution today and where do we need to hit the threshold requirement or its not worth fielding? How can we take a modular acquisition approach?
Have you and your contracting officer had discussions with your prime contractor on if there was a need to accelerate deliveries, what the Courses of Action (COAs) are. If given more funding, what materials, equipment, and personnel could be added? When can we turn on or scale up the production lines? What government imposed requirements could you remove or reduce? What contingency contracting is needed to descope, accelerate, or iterate on the system development and production? What long-lead items can be acquired now? What contract vehicles would you use? What contractual elements would you need to modify or develop? Can you work out key terms and conditions upfront?
Have you had discussions with the responsible test organization and certification authorities about balancing speed with risk? What is the new priority order for testing that addresses the highest risks first, that operational commanders can determine the cut line when to proceed with production and delivery. These communities will be immediately strained to keep up with the demand to get more capabilities out the door.
Is there an alternate solution to pivot towards? - A capability that a competitor, DARPA, or other organization could leverage as an interim solution? Can we repurpose existing systems in novel ways to provide a partial solution?
What about training operators and maintainers of the system? How do we get them in earlier to give them a running start? How can we iterate on CONOPS and TTPs?
How much additional funding would be needed to address each potential COAs? What fidelity went into these cost estimates? Can you rapidly improve fidelity in discussion with key DoD and industry stakeholders?
Industry Leaders
If the government called you seeking to accelerate the program you have on contract to develop and produce, do you have a good idea of where to accelerate? How long would it take you to develop viable COAs? What relief from Gov’t requirements you would ask for to accelerate deliveries? Do you have an understanding of your subcontractors’ and suppliers’ challenges, risks, and opportunities to accelerate? Do you know the long lead items to attack first?
If you have a viable partial or alternate solution to an acquisition program scheduled to deliver many years from now that would be helpful in the Indo-Pacific, do you have a plan to offer it to the DoD? Can you offer them a draft acquisition, contracting, and related strategies to rapidly acquire, test, integrate, and deploy your solutions? Do you have an understanding of costs/price, schedule, and required certifications ready to go? Do you have the financial resources and leadership commitment to move out at risk, ahead of government contracts and funding?
Most program offices are focused today on navigating their programs through the vast DoD bureaucracy. They have more than enough oversight and less than required personnel to execute their programs. Most will likely tell you they don’t have the bandwidth to think through this notional scenario.
Given the threat of a conflict with China increases, wouldn’t it be prudent to spend a few hours thinking through the what ifs? Would it be worth key stakeholders having a few discussions to understand where the priorities, risks, and constraints are and draft up a contingency plan?
Forward leaning PEOs could take the approach of Gen Mike Minihan, Commander of Air Mobility Command, whose memo on preparing for war with China grabbed headlines and drove vibrant discussion. Conduct short notice exercises on key programs in your portfolio to get them thinking through the COAs. Include key stakeholder groups whenever practicable or assign SMEs to role play outsiders like the prime contractor.
Deterrence is the primary objective in dealing with China. Delivering high impactful capabilities to INDOPACOM and Taiwan ASAP should be a top priority for DoD leaders. In the event deterrence fails, we will not have the luxury of time to think through the strategies, execute them, to try to accelerate deliveries during a war with a peer adversary.
The more we can have draft contingency plans in place to execute if the unthinkable occurs, the better off we’ll be to respond and succeed in conflict. The more we can hedge our risks by working through these strategies the better.
This contingency planning and exercises will also drive valuable discussions with the key stakeholder groups to understand barriers, assumptions, opportunities to accelerate the program within the current environment to support deterrence.
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