Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall said Tuesday that, for all the talk of open systems and interoperability coming out of the Defense Department in recent years, he hasn’t seen the attention translate into programmatic changes.
Kendall noted that many systems coming through now are inherited from program managers a few years ago. But still, “we have been stressing open systems and effective management of intellectual property ever since we started the first round of Better Buying Power.” Though some progress has been made, he said, “I’m a little frustrated frankly that we haven’t made more progress on inter-service interoperability in some areas.”
Specifically, Kendall said during a question and answer session at the International Test and Evaluation Association’s annual conference that “Air-Sea Battle was intended to be a way for the Navy and the Air Force in particular to fight more effectively together, to work better together. But to be candid, I have not seen much coming out of that in terms of actual changes in programs to allow that to happen. So there’s definitely more work to be done there.”
Kendall, who recently unveiled a draft of his third iteration of BBP, said that modularity, open systems and interoperability are key to smart acquisition.
“Interoperability and the ability to have competition for follow-on work, for payloads or for communications modules…really depends on our ability” to emphasize open architecture and secure IP rights as needed, he said.