By Emelie Rutherford
The Coast Guard’s new acquisition plan calls for the service to work more closely with the Pentagon and rely on third-party assessments.
The Coast Guard’s acquisition directorate last week released the fifth edition of its strategic plan, the Blueprint for Continuous Improvement, which will guide the service for the next two years. The 61-page document emphasizes performance-measurement measures to improve the service’s acquisition and contracting business processes.
Previous version of the plan, which is updated every two years, outlined specific efforts to reform and improve the Coast Guard’s formerly-troubled acquisition enterprise.
“Those reform efforts have largely been completed and this year’s plan continues our improvement efforts and marks a shift toward a more focused measurement of organizational performance within our reformed acquisition environment,” Coast Guard Chief Acquisition Officer Rear Admiral Ronald J. Rabago says in the report.
The Coast Guard’s reorganized Mission Support enterprise, he notes, is poised to serve as the systems integrator for all of the service’s major recapitalization and mission- support programs. The service in 2007 began phasing out Integrated Coast Guard Systems (ICGS)–a partnership between Northrop Grumman [NOC] and Lockheed Martin [LMT]–as the lead systems integrator (LSI) of its once-rocky Deepwater modernization program.
The report calls for the Coast Guard to partner more with the Pentagon and other federal agencies to avoid duplicative efforts in acquisition services and project execution.
“There are aspects of many Coast Guard missions that provide opportunities for partnerships with other federal agencies,” it says.
The plan also says the service “must maintain its commitment to independent validation and verification of its business processes, cost estimates, and technical designs through third-party experts.”
“Independent assessments, in many cases, provide valuable input to the Coast Guard’s own certification process, allowing agency engineers to make better-informed decisions regarding the designs and operational capabilities of new assets,” it says. “Independent validation and verification also avoid duplication of effort by making use of expertise in other government and private sector entities to inform Coast Guard processes.”
The Coast Guard’s acquisition directorate is overseeing a $27 billion
recapitalization investment portfolio that includes more than 20 major acquisition programs and projects related to cutters, small boats, aircraft; and electronic command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems.
The Blueprint for Continuous Improvement can be found at: http://www.uscg.mil/acquisition/aboutus/blueprintv5.pdf.