Defense Innovation Board | The Contracting Education Academy

May 30, 2019 By AMK

Building a 21st century defense acquisition workforce

Every year, the Department of Defense spends roughly $300 billion to purchase everything from nuclear submarines to accounting services. The defense acquisition workforce is responsible not only for negotiating prices, enforcing requirements, and managing delivery on these acquisitions, but also for addressing issues like interoperability, sustainability, cyber protection, and supply chain security.

And every year, Congress adds complexity to the system, with almost 250 provisions of acquisition legislation changing the rules on types of contracts, contract audits, source selection criteria, commercial items acquisition, data rights and intellectual property, and other issues from 2016 to 2018 alone.

Advocates of acquisition reform have long sought changes in the civil service rules to make it easier to build the talent that the Pentagon needs to meet this challenge, but despite the wide array of legislative authorities now available, little has changed. What is needed is not a new set of rules, but a new mindset: If the Department of Defense wants to develop employees rather than just manage them for immediate performance, it must stop making hiring decisions position by position and establish a system that enables it to rotate future civilian leaders through a series of time-limited, career-building assignments. Instead of managing civil service positions, the Department must start managing its people.

The Call for Civilian Personnel Reform

Sixteen years ago, the National Commission on the Public Service (known as the “Second Volcker Commission”), reported that the federal government was not adequately staffed to meet the demands of the 21st century. Instead of attracting talent, the federal government too often drives it away. “Those who enter the civil service,” the commission reported, “often find themselves trapped in a maze of rules and regulations that thwart their personal development and stifle their creativity. The best are underpaid, the worst, overpaid. Too many of the most talented leave the public service too early, too many of the least talented stay too long.”

Keep reading article at: https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/building-a-21st-century-defense-acquisition-workforce/

May 21, 2019 By AMK

Software acquisition – still a tough nut to crack

Effectively acquiring and sustaining the massive number of software systems the Pentagon employs is a perennial problem, experts say. It often takes too long for the Defense Department to purchase and deploy new, cutting-edge software or upgrades.

Despite efforts by Congress to root out the problem through various well-intentioned reports, issues persist, said Jeff Boleng, a special assistant for software acquisition at the Defense Department. He is a key member of Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord’s executive leadership team.

“We’ve got a whole bunch of numbers staring us down — we’ve got 804, 805, 809, 813, 872, 873, 874, 868,” he said, referring to sections of recent National Defense Authorization Acts.

“Essentially, Congress is inside DoD’s decision loop here telling us how to fix software more quickly than we can actually address some of the problems and implement them,” he noted.

Boleng is working closely with the Section 872 panel which — alongside the Defense Innovation Board — is focusing on software acquisition regulations, he said during a recent event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The report will soon wrap up and is slated to be delivered to the Pentagon in April and then to Congress in May, he added.

“There’s a lot in there. Surprisingly, there’s not a ton that’s new,” he said. “I hope that the timing is right for some of these recommendations. We’ve been looking back in history at various other studies that have been done on acquisition reform, software technology, information technologies. [And] we’ve been lamenting about this problem since the ‘70s — literally when software first started to even be created for defense systems — and a lot of times we say the same things.”

Keep reading article at: http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/3/19/algorithmic-warfare-software-acquisition—still-a-tough-nut-to-crack

May 17, 2019 By AMK

All this ‘innovation’ won’t save the Pentagon

The Defense Department, a hierarchy fixated on technology, is unequipped to confront a world of disruptive challenges.

I recently had the privilege of attending a Silicon Valley conference attended by leaders across the national security “innovation ecosystem.” The term reflects today’s veritable freshet of interest in defense innovation, from self-styled “virtuous insurgents” and defense “hackers” to individual agency innovation offices and entirely new outfits with on-the-nose names such as the Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Innovation Board. All this may suggest that the national security apparatus is at last confronting the need for long-overdue changes to how we do business.

For two days, I listened to senior people from the military services, large defense agencies, and major components of the intelligence community as they described various “mission acceleration” efforts—that is, finding shortcuts that allow us to do what we’ve been doing a bit faster, a bit cheaper, a bit better.

This is a problem.

Innovation—from the Latin innovare—literally means to “make new.” But defense and other national security leaders often confuse it with automation or modernization. Automating an existing process doesn’t change the process itself. Nor does it change the game to incrementally improve the range, speed, or—forgive me—the “lethality” of existing weapons. Such efforts are like a homeowner fixing a broken window, painting a dilapidated wall, or adding a bathroom without considering the decaying foundations of the house itself.

Keep reading article at: https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/04/all-innovation-wont-save-pentagon/156487/

April 16, 2019 By AMK

Pentagon promises to get to work on software acquisition overhaul

The Pentagon’s acquisition chief vowed on Thursday that the Defense Department will get to work immediately on a sweeping revamp of DoD’s practices and policies for buying and building software.

After a year of study and under a directive from Congress, the Defense Innovation Board (DIB) drafted 26 separate recommendations to fix DoD software acquisition, including 10 “primary” recommendations. Members presented their findings at a public board meeting on Thursday.

At the meeting, Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, explicitly endorsed several of the DIB’s suggestions, including that the Pentagon needs entirely separate software acquisition pathways, distinct from its traditional hardware-centric rules.

She said her office had already begun rewriting DoD’s primary acquisition policy document, Instruction 5000.02, to achieve that end.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2019/03/pentagon-promises-to-get-to-work-on-software-acquisition-overhaul/

Effectively acquiring and sustaining the massive number of software systems the Pentagon employs is a perennial problem, experts say. It often takes too long for the Defense Department to purchase and deploy new, cutting-edge software or upgrades.

The Defense Department, a hierarchy fixated on technology, is unequipped to confront a world of disruptive challenges.

The Pentagon’s acquisition chief vowed on Thursday that the Defense Department will get to work immediately on a sweeping revamp of DoD’s practices and policies for buying and building software.

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