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
In an LPTA procurement, the Government evaluates proposals for mere technical acceptability under the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria. Of the technically acceptable proposals received from eligible offerors, the Government then awards the contract to the lowest-price proposal, without considering any additional value that more expensive proposals may provide. In an LPTA acquisition, it does not matter that the second least expensive proposal may have three times more technical merit than the lowest-price technically acceptable proposal. Even if that technically superior proposal is only a dime more expensive, the Government is required to make the award to the acceptable proposal that is ten cents cheaper.
The proposed rule, open to comment until Feb. 4, 2019 would be implemented in the Defense Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), and is based on both the 2017 and 2018 National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAAs), which include language to define when LPTA is to be used.
This year they range from a strong focus on making it easier for agencies to buy commercial items to mixed messages around the use of other transaction agreements to the ever increasing concerns about too many bid protests.
