NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Air Force’s Agile Combat Support (ACS) Directorate, which oversees about 400 programs and a $7 billion annual budget, is looking for ways to reduce equipment sustainment demands on its 1,800-person staff so it can focus more on implementing new technology, the organization’s head said Sept. 20.
For example, the directorate is merging six bomber armaments testers into a single common tester, and is reducing the number of Global Positioning System (GPS)/Inertial Navigation System (INS) configurations to about 20, down from more than 260, said Lynda Rutledge, program executive officer and director of ACS.
“The idea was to have a common GPS/INS configuration 20 years ago …. and we ended up with 260-plus configurations,” she said. “You can image trying to maintain and sustain that in the field. It’s overwhelming.
Rutledge’s directorate develops, acquires, fields, modernizes and sustains capabilities in such areas as automatic test systems, avionics, electronic warfare, human systems and simulators. ACS is part of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
Rutledge, who spoke on an agile acquisition panel at an Air Force Association conference here, said that with so many programs on her plate, she is trying to figure out how to upgrade them quickly and keep them resilient to cyber attacks. She is also looking for ways to get contractor work started more quickly.
“It’s sometimes very embarrassing to say it takes me two years to get on contract and then two years to actually build the actual item,” she said. “There’s something wrong with that, so we’re trying to change that paradigm.”
Rutledge also is exploring how her agency will interact with the Defense Department’s new Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUx) high-tech outreach initiative. She indicated it may be challenging to figure out how to field ideas from the three DIUx hubs, as it is with technology developed in a laboratory.