By Geoff Fein
The Navy’s efforts to develop a formal acquisition process that will help serve the interests and objectives of the service should not be viewed as a negative by contractors or an attempt to pit the Navy against them, a top service official said.
Navy Secretary Donald Winter is trying to reinvigorate the service’s acquisition process and restore some discipline in the way the Navy determines what it will need for the future.
He told Defense Daily in a recent interview that he had briefed some very senior-level industry representatives about his ideas.
“I’m not sure they really understand. There are some that are, quite frankly, a little bit nervous,” he said.
What Winter is proposing is something akin to Australia’s Two Pass system, in which programs are reviewed twice (Defense Daily, November 5).
The more the Navy can do by nailing down what it wants to buy, the better off it is going to be. The results should enable the service to develop and achieve program concepts, costs, and schedules, Winter believes.
He also wants to make sure that once a program begins moving along the acquisition track, a proper systems engineering process is used to help the service reach a decision on what it wants.
“What I am trying to do right now is develop a very formal process that we can go ahead and establish within Navy, as the standard by which we connect, in terms of developing the program and building the budget with what the acquisition people do–in terms of going out and acquiring it–with a level of specificity that what we get out the other end really serves the interests and objectives of the department,” he said (Defense Daily, Nov. 5).
This acquisition approach shouldn’t impact industry in the negative sense, and, if anything, it should be viewed as a positive, Winter added.
“First of all we are talking about recapturing a small amount of the systems engineering work, trying to get some of the systems engineers who went across to the other side of M Street [in Washington, D.C.] to come back and work on the Navy side,” he said. “It shouldn’t upset contractors that some of that work is going to be done within Navy.”
The Navy will probably also need the support of Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) and Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA)-type people to help do some of that systems engineering, Winter added.
“But in the end, if we do it right, it should have far fewer perturbations in requirements, and we ought to be able to develop a much better understanding of what it is we are buying and why we are buying it and be in a much better position to both cost it and defend it,” Winter explained.
There are those who scoff at the idea that the Navy can take back some of the systems engineering work. It wasn’t that long ago the service lost a lot of its system engineers to industry–a situation that had long-lasting implications on the acquisition process.
“People say we have lost the capability, we lost most of our systems engineers…you have to depend on industry,” Winter said. “That to me is a death spiral.”
Those systems engineers who work for the Navy would end up overseeing the people who are actually going to get to do the real work, which is a “de-motivating experience,” which means that the Navy is going to lose more of them, Winter noted. “Which means I am going to wind up with less capability in-house, which means I am going to have to contract out, which means I am going to have to become more dependent on industry again.”
It is critically important to state up front what direction the Navy should be heading, he added.
“If you are a sharp systems engineer and you want to be involved in this, come over and we will give you a home, give you real work, meaningful work you’ll be able to be an architect of. You’ll be able to take responsibility and have an impact,” Winter said.
This effort, however, should not be seen as an issue of Navy versus contractors, he pointed out.
“It’s a matter of motivating contractors to do what really serves both of us, in the end, in a positive sense,” he said. “This is a matter of getting all of these issues, or at least a significant fraction of them, worked before hand. Because, if we do that, we should be able to engage in a much more business-like process.”
Contractors have to be a participant, even in the front-end systems engineering process, Winter said. The Navy needs to know where are the break points and at what point does something become an issue.
“Is it too big, too long, too heavy, what is it that you can and cannot do, what type of approvals do you need if we want to change the propulsion system, what issues come at various points in terms of electrical system design,” Winter said. “We need to have industry help us with that aspect, because it all relates down to what can and can’t be done.
“But industry providing inputs, with Navy making informed decisions, is different from industry making the decisions and embedding them as part of a tier of many, many decisions in the competitive process that we then just have a choice of accepting or rejecting as a package,” he added.