By Ann Roosevelt

The United States should keep an eye on acquisition developments around the world, but streamlining the process at home would help in a rapidly changing environment, according to a Raytheon [RTN] executive.

“I don’t think we need to reinvent contract vehicles,” Smith said. “We have plenty of contract vehicles–maybe we have too many contract vehicles–because it’s often confusing for those trying to buy,” Daniel Smith, Raytheon vice president and president of Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), said in a recent interview. “We cannot have a contracting set of rules that is 1980 vintage about how we contract, but this is a case, we have a saying in our business, less is more. And so you really need to streamline the process, in our factory terms, lean out the options.”

In a late September speech at the Fletcher School Maritime Symposium, Smith said, “I think we really as a country need to figure out when competition is good and when competition defeats the end objective, which is in my world, getting capability to our soldiers.”

This is particularly important in global competition.

“When we go to compete internationally, most international competitors come with their government supporting them, what might be called a national approach to the competition,” he said.

However, the United States might have two or three companies involved in that competition so the government can’t support a U.S. offering.

“I think there are some things that should be supported as a government position and the U.S. government should be actively involved in making sure that friends of the U.S. get the best technologies the U.S. is going to make available,” he said, offering some examples.

If the United States were to sell Aegis, from a Navy perspective, “it would make a whole lot of sense to me that the government would support Lockheed Martin as the Aegis prime,” he said. “Maybe if we were going to sell Global Hawk that the U.S. government support Northrop Grumman. If you’re going to sell Patriot, you support Raytheon. Right now, we don’t have that kind of ability.”

Other nations and regions are working on their own acquisition strategies, such as the European Union, and Australia.

Participating in one such acquisition, called alliance contracting, Raytheon just signed a $1.2 billion contract on Australia’s Air Warfare Destroyer, where the company is in an alliance with the government and the shipyard to produce the new destroyers.

“I think we ought to be watching, and analyzing and modifying if it’s necessary, picking the ones that are right for us,” he said. “And I believe they change over time. That’s part of the issue, is the environment changes so fast, if you spend a whole lot of time to pick the best of breed models, it doesn’t help you a lot, I believe, at the end of the day.”