By Geoff Fein

Navy Secretary Donald Winter is looking to reinvigorate the service’s acquisition process and at the same time restore some discipline in the way the Navy determines what assets it needs for the future.

“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 told Defense Daily in a recent interview.

With little time left on the job, he would like to make a notable improvement in acquisition.

“One of the things I have chosen to really focus on is the what I sometimes refer to as the big ‘A’ acquisition problem, as opposed to the little ‘A’ acquisition problem, which sometimes is referred to as procurement,” Winter said.

Although he has fewer than 18 months left to set his plan in motion, Winter believes it is doable.

“It won’t be implemented in the sense of fully up and running….[but] getting it started, I definitely believe we can,” he said.

Although it would appear that shipbuilding would be high on the list of areas to first use his strategy, Winter said the ideas he is proposing can be applied to everything the Navy builds and buys.

“One of the areas that, quite frankly, is becoming the poster child…the path finder for this whole process, is NextGen, the follow on to NMCI (Navy Marine Corps Internet),” Winter noted. “Have we figured out what we want to do with this and what is the impact? What does it mean to the fleet and to deployed bases…overseas bases? What does it mean to personnel? Has anybody worked through all of these issues?”

The current NMCI contract with Electronic Data Systems [EDS] is scheduled to expire in 2010 (Defense Daily, July 31).

The Navy is now holding sessions on the next iteration of NMCI, Winter added. “We even have the CNO showing up for these sessions.”

Besides NMCI, Winter believes the Navy’s next cruiser, CG(X), is another good example.

“It is a little earlier, just being in the AoA (Analysis of Alternatives) phase,” he said. “That should prove to be another good example of how we could go through this process and work through it.”

Personnel at the Naval Support Activity, Philadelphia, are attempting to use some of these ideas in the area of logistics. They are looking at the different types of valves the Navy buys from manufacturers to see if there is a way to standardize this, Winter said.

Just the issue of types and quantities of valves has huge implications for the Navy, he added. “The numbers of valves and the numbers of different types of valves is just huge and the cost is incredible.”

The more the Navy can do to define and control the acquisition process, the better off it will be, Winter said.

“The more we can do by nailing down what it is we want to buy, the better off we are going to be, and the more likely it is we are able to develop program concepts, costs, schedules, all of which can actually be achieved,” he added.

Winter recently briefed industry representatives on his proposal, which includes aspects of Australia’s Two Pass acquisition system–an acquisition process where programs are reviewed twice.

“The first time is more like what we do, ‘we need something, it is going to look like this, it is going to have so many guns, this type of radar, this type of range,’ then they go back and spend a lot of time working through it…[putting out] exactly what it is going to be,” Winter said. “It’s that second pass that I am trying to reinvigorate here.”

Winter said he wants to make sure that once a program is approved and after Congress has said they will fund it, when the Navy examines what it wants, that decision is developed through a proper systems engineering process.

“I want to make sure that product gets reviewed at the senior levels of not only the secretariat, but also at the services that are involved, because again, these are critical decisions, there are significant issues here that are going to impact us,” Winter said.

For example, with regard to a new ship, officials will have to make decisions on such things as crew size, as well as the competency level and maturity level of sailors. All of that has to be factored into these decisions, he added.

“It’s got to be the result of a systems engineering process to look at the options to decide how to optimize the fleet with this new capability, so that you add a optimized capability that optimizes the fleet. And there are some trade-offs there. You may wind up in a little bit of a compromise here on that particular platform to make it consistent with what is available in the fleet. And you have to work through all of those trade offs, and you have to do that with proper systems engineering and then you have to bring it back to the seniors.,” Winter said.

“I want to have the CNO and the commandant, and their staffs, reviewing this material afterward and making the decisions. I am not talking about taking every single one of this myriad of hundreds of components, but it has to be put into a context in which the major trades there…and there will be these trades…performance versus commonality, performance versus crew size…training issues, have that all properly reviewed and assessed,” he added. “And that’s a review process we don’t have right now, at least not formally within the Navy.”