By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps’ top equipment buyer predicts a nascent Pentagon policy requiring multiple, competitive prototypes in the early stages of large weapon-system programs will yield more cost and technological stability in future years.
Marine Corps Systems Command (MARCORSYSCOM) leader Brig. Gen. Michael Brogan acknowledged the “guys with the green eyeshades”–those trying to keep costs down–are “concerned” about the added research-and-development costs borne by competitive prototyping. Brogan said such worries are “unfortunate,” considering the longer-term benefits of having multiple contractors dabble in developing programs.
“It’s hard to quantify the return on investment that competitive prototyping provides,” Brogan said in an interview last week. “But it is clear, in my view, that the investment will be worth it in the final analysis. I think it’s absolutely the right thing to do.”
It’s been nearly a year since Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics John Young issued a Sept. 19 memo saying that for big-ticket programs the services must have two or more competing teams producing prototypes of “key system elements” through the System Design and Development (SDD) phase.
Young, in an acting capacity at the time, said he wanted to stop the trend of Pentagon weapons programs lacking sound and proven technology.
Brogan said last week the competitive prototyping policy is “tremendous,” and gave an example of how it could have helped the Marine Corps’ delayed Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) effort. Brogan earlier in his career was the program manager for EFV, an amphibious vehicle initially dubbed the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAAV).
“The original acquisition strategy for AAAV was to carry both of the competing contractors through PDRR (program-definition risk-reduction), have them build their first- generation prototypes and have a drive-off, swim-off, shoot-off, [but] because of fiscal constraints the Marine Corps downselected to one going into PDRR,” Brogan said. “How different would that program have been had we been able to maintain competition all the way through PDRR?”
“I’m a huge advocate for maintaining competition and getting as many good ideas as you can ahead of time,” he said. “Spend the money up front early for a relatively minimal investment, [and] you can perhaps avoid what has happened to EFV, where we’re now going to repeat SDD.”
EFV prototypes failed to achieve the reliability key performance parameter in testing two years ago, and the Marine Corps last month issued contractor General Dynamics [GD] a new $766.8 million SDD-2 contract calling for modifying existing prototypes and building new ones. The effort’s low-rate-initial production decision has been pushed back at least for years, to 2011 at the earliest.
Brogan said EFV program manager Col. John Bryant, who is retiring, “did a tremendous job,” and that be believes program officials “will be able to meet their reliability key performance parameter.”
In hindsight, Brogan said, “If we had gone all the way through PDRR with two vendors [for EFV], who knows what would have happened.”
Looking forward, the MARCORSYSCOM commander said he is pleased the joint Army-Marine Corps Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program will have three competitive prototype contracts.
“For a ground vehicle program that is likely to be as large as that one will become, the fact that Sec. Young has demanded that they go to at least three [competing prototype teams] I think is almost minimal,” Brogan said. “I would have loved to have seen five teams.”
Brogan has played a large role in steering the multi-service, 15,000-vehicle Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP) program, which started in late 2006 with the Marine Corps seeking prototypes from nine truck builders.
“One could argue that even though MRAP predates [Young’s competitive prototyping] dictum, that’s in effect what we did by awarding nine contracts,” Brogan said. “And we necked that down to five vendors who are producing. Now ideally you wouldn’t stay with five in a more structured, traditional program. But having those nine allowed us to choose those that were most capable, [have] users’ input in that early limited-user evaluation, [and it] also gave us insight into which were the most suitable. And [because of] the fact that we had some of the vehicles in theater, we had insight into which ones were operationally effective. What we ended up with were very capable platforms. But in the process we winnowed away four manufacturers. Doing that same thing I think just makes sense.”
Some in the Marine Corps previously predicted the future Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC) program would be among the first batch of new programs subjected to the new competitive prototyping mandate. However, service officials decided in April to halt plans to allow the MPC to enter into the technology demonstration stage and then issue a request for proposals for it–actions expected this past spring–because of a lack of funding, and delay the schedule by two years (Defense Daily, July 1).
“It was purely budget driven that (MPC) moved to the right,” Brogan said. “There is still the recognition that it is a valid requirement, that we need additional armor- protected tactical lift in the ground-combat element. But the decision was made that we just couldn’t afford it in the timeframe that the program office had laid out. So there’s still commitment, and there’s still some activities going on within the program office, but at a far reduced scope to what we had hoped in the acquisition world.”