The head of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) plans to revise some of the language in his acquisition reform bill to alleviate concerns from industry and the Pentagon, he said April 21.

The chairman’s mark of the fiscal year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which will be released Monday, will still include provisions meant to expand prototyping and increase the number of open architecture systems procured by the department, HASC Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. However, he plans to roll back some of the language in the bill that mandates new platforms conform to a plug-and-play approach.

“What we want to do is encourage this modular, open architecture system in every way we can, but not say that it is the answer in every case,” he said. “So we add flexibility there, we change some of the definitions somewhat.”

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee

The original bill proscribes that all future major weapons systems comprise subsystems—which would be owned by the manufacturer—that are integrated together on an open, government-owned interface (Defense Daily, March 15). When the bill was released in March, a committee staffer said that the Defense Department already has similar internal policies promoting open architecture systems, but implementation is not always consistent.

The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, Frank Kendall, met with Thornberry in March to discuss his issues with the acquisition bill. Although the department was broadly supportive of the bill, Kendall believed the open architecture portion was too constrictive, he told Defense Daily on Wednesday.

“It is very rigid in how it requires modularity in open systems. We need flexibility to deviate from that on a case by case basis,” he said. “We agree to the intent, in fact, we’re already basically doing that, but the language as it’s currently written doesn’t give us any latitude.”

Kendall added that the department had given “drafting assistance” to the committee on that concern as well as other minor issues with the bill.

Although the general thrust of the NDAA acquisition reform provisions mirror Thornberry’s original bill, the HASC chairman said alterations were made to almost every portion of the proposed legislation, which suggested changes in the area of prototyping and experimentation, open systems, intellectual property and program management.

In the chairman’s mark, Thornberry pushed back some implementation dates until 2019 and made adjustments to the structure of the prototyping fund, he said. The first iteration of the bill crafted a new prototyping process that would give services more flexibility for experimentation, set a $25 million limit on projects and implement new oversight mechanisms.  

The hope is that by speeding up acquisition and simplifying the prototyping process, the Pentagon will be able to get technologies to troops quicker. Making platforms more modular also benefits the industrial base because companies can more frequently compete to build subsystems for planes, tanks and ships.

“It’s not just the big providers of airplanes,” Thornberry said. “People who make little black boxes that increase the capability of that airplane—could be a small or midsize company, a lot of them are—then they can bid directly and get that faster into the hands of the warfighter.”

The full committee may also take up the issue of bid protests during its markup of the NDAA on April 27 through amendments, he said. The Defense Department has submitted a legislative proposal to HASC that would force companies launching a protest to choose either the Government Accountability Office or the federal claims court to adjudicate the case. Currently, vendors can pursue both avenues – sometimes filing a suit with federal claims court after GAO denies their protest, as Lockheed Martin [LMT] did for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program.

Congress, like the Defense Department, is becoming more concerned by the frequency and length of bid protests, Thornberry said.

“Some members have come to me and talked about the idea of offering an amendment that would say, if you protest a bid and lose, you got to pay a penalty,” he said. “I don’t know what the outcome will be or all of the options, but it is an area of concern that I think we’ll debate and maybe have some votes.”