Can the Pentagon’s contracting system keep pace with the demands of today’s battlefield?

Eric White Tell me a little bit about the idea behind this report and why you wanted to look at the concept of speed from acquisition or contracting to actually getting technology out to the battlefield. What made you want to investigate that portion of defense procurement?

Stephanie Halcrow Absolutely, Eric. Thanks for having me here today. So when my co-author, Dr. Jim Hasik, who is a research fellow at Stevens Institute of Technology, and I started to banter about like what was going to be our next project. We said, you know, let’s pick something that frankly, you know, government has complete control of and is something that is at a tactical level. And so we thought, hey, like let’s look at contracting because that applies with contracting both government control of the process and it’s at the tactical level and frankly, it was unique. There wasn’t much work or research done on it. So we thought we could have an interesting input and take on it, So that’s what drove us to look at this speed in contracting activity.

Eric White Gotcha. Yeah, they don’t make a lot of war movies about procurement officials buying up all the ammunition that’s needed. You know, when it came to speed within the Defense Department, what were some of the main findings that you saw when it comes to how fast the government is able to buy something and actually implement it?

Stephanie Halcrow Yeah, absolutely. So we really took a look, a broad look, at what were some of the advantages of speed in contracting? What were some the power of speed and what created contracting as the competitive advantage? And some of those — and this was industry-wide, not just in the military — and some of those included delivering value sooner, which is a point we make. Now that’s probably pretty obvious, but if you think about it, like the sooner you can get somebody on contract, the sooner they can start work, right? And it is obvious, but I think people forget that. Something else that we looked at was that it reduces, or that we found was that reduces overall cost. Again, something that somebody might say that’s really obvious, but if I was to flip that on the head and say, contracting team, the longer it takes you to do this contract, the higher you drive the price, the more expensive it gets. I think that would really stop contracting teams and say, oh man, maybe we should think about going faster. There’s a couple other items that we’ve found, but the final one that I want to highlight is that we really saw like in technology development, that the speed of contracting, the speed at which you could get the folks working on the technology could actually be the X factor, as we call it, of advancing the technology. I don’t think that’s something that’s considered at the tactical level with contracting teams, and I think it really should be.

Eric White We’re speaking with Stephanie Halcrow. She’s a senior fellow at the George Mason University Center for Government Contracting. Yeah, historians will tell you that one of the major advantages for the U.S. In World War II, Germany loses a plane, it takes years for them to replace that plane where we would lose a plane and it was back up, another one was back in the air in a couple of weeks. People don’t think about the tactical advantage that a sturdy contracting venue can provide. Fast forward to now, where the technology is clearly more advanced, how do they balance that with more advanced technology, where they’re not just making tanks out of out of steel, they’re making high capacity computers and AI technology drones, all that new stuff? How do you balance speed with the complexity that comes with a supply chain that has gotten more diverse?

Stephanie Halcrow Yeah, so Dr. Hasik and I highlight a lot of different historical examples of how speed and contracting has either supported the military activities and provided a competitive advantage or also examples of where speed and contracting have not resulted in great advantage. In fact, there’s a part of our paper where we discussed the Competition in Contracting Act and we actually say that the Competition but Not Speed in Contracting Act because the Competition in Contracting Act has really burdened the the contracting community and really slowed everything down but there but there are certainly highlights out there. So, you mentioned World War II, and a more recent highlight is the MRAP program, where, you know, they didn’t have any special authorities. They didn’t any waivers to do what they did. They used all the same rules and regulations and policies that were available to any organization at the time, but they just did it faster. They embraced speed, and frankly, the end result was lives were saved. And so you have these big ideas, like in World War II, okay, we won World War II, but when you can directly link a single program and the ability to deliver that program to the war fighter actually results in lives saved, that is something tactical contracting teams should really embrace.

Eric White Yeah, I can hear the procurement official pounding on the speaker: yeah, that all sounds very nice. But how do we actually go about doing that? So you have some recommendations here on where you can speed things up. And it turns out it may just be all about shifting the focus to speed itself. How do you go about do that?

Stephanie Halcrow Absolutely, so first and foremost, make the decision to go fast, fast. A lot of people say, we need to go faster, we need go faster but they spend months and months and months trying to figure that out. So make the decisions to go fast, fast and this administration is definitely making those decisions to fast, fast and I say that like at the highest policy levels but this is something that the tactical teams need to do as well. In the programs, the contracting officers, the program managers, they need to make that decision to go fast as well. I would offer that, you know, for those policy teams, for the folks on the Hill, to start talking about speed. And they already are doing this, but it’s a real shift. It’s a shift that’s happened in the last couple of years. Frankly, when I was on the hill, I talked about reform a lot. And I supported my boss in writing legislation that in every title, the word was reform. But I think it’s very hard to think about how do you implement reform and how do measure our success in that area. But man, when you start talking about speed and going faster, that’s really easy to measure. And so I encourage policy folks to start talking speed and to drop the term reform. I also find in the paper that investing in the workforce is important. I think every conversation circles back to the workforce. Most people, when they think about investing in the workforce, they think about training and education. But there’s really a lack of investment and prioritization on providing the workforce the tools to do their job, the IT systems, the networks, frankly. If a network is down half the day, how can the workforce do their jobs efficiently? How can they move fast? When the network isn’t supporting them. So when the paper talks about, we recommend investing in the workforce, it expands it broader than just training, just education and think about the tools and the support infrastructure to do that.

Eric White You mentioned that the focus used to be on reform, and that wasn’t without merit, right? I mean, there were some projects that were sped along too fast that maybe money was spent where it shouldn’t have been spent, or the technology ended up not working in the end, or it outpaced its need. What can you say about balancing that with speed? Because you have to keep that in mind, no?

Stephanie Halcrow Yeah, sure. I mean, if you deliver a capability that doesn’t work really fast, then there’s not much goodness in that. But I don’t know that that is the characterization of the military procurement system. I think the characterization in the military procurement system is that they prioritize being careful over fast and frankly it results in not delivering anything or delivering something way behind the need. And so certainly that is something you need to be careful about, but I don’t think that is the current criticism of the procurement system. And if it was, I would celebrate it. I would if they were delivering things so fast and they missed the mark.

Eric White Kudos to both of us for not using the term Valley of Death, but I guess I just did. What is it that is serving as potential speed bumps other than some of the past legislation that you had mentioned? Are there other things that are hampering one’s ability to move fast in this?

Stephanie Halcrow Well, you know, that’s just it. It really is a paradigm and an approach at the tactical level. As I mentioned about the MRAP program, they used all of the existing statutes, all of their existing regulations, all the existing policies. They had no special authorities and they were able to move fast. We see pockets of places across the military procurement system that are able to do this as well without special authorities. So I would say that this is not about needing any new legislation, needing any new strategies. It is about making the decision to go fast, fast. And that can be done at the tactical level.