A provision in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) would require the Army to halt development of data management software if a commercial alternative would suffice to perform the mission.

The conference report on the 3,000-page bill released Wednesday contains a House amendment that would require the Secretary of the Army to restructure versions of the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) after Increment 1. DCGS is the Army’s primary battlefield data management system.

“The Secretary of the Army shall discontinue development of new software code of any component of the system for which there is commercial, open source, or government-off-the-shelf software that is capable of fulfilling at least 80 percent of the system requirements; and conduct a review of the acquisition strategy for the program to ensure that procurement of commercial software is the preferred method of meeting program requirements,” the amendment to the NDAA reads.  

DCGS-A Photo: U.S. Army
DCGS-A
Photo: U.S. Army

“The Secretary of the Army shall not award any contract for the development of a new component software capability if such a capability is already a commercial item.”

Inclusion of the language was inspired by the recent conclusion of a months-long court battle with data-management software company Palantir. The firm successfully argued that the Army unfairly excluded commercially available software in favor of developing its own system with Lockheed Martin [LMT].

The Army already has spent 15 years and $6 billion developing DCGS, the Army’s current system for intelligence information sharing, processing, operational use and storage. DCGS-A Increment 2 is the Army’s next phase of DCGS-A development. Lockheed Martin has built and integrated elements of DCGS.

Winning the case in federal claims court effectively forced the Army to reopen the competition and stack commercial software against developmental offerings.

The NDAA states that the “conferees expect the Secretary of the Army to rapidly execute this acquisition so as to quickly improve the field performance of the existing distributed common ground system for the Army, which we do not believe is adequately serving the needs of units at division, brigade and battalion levels.”