The Pentagon will have a higher degree of control over the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program than DoD has had with the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 fighter, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said on May 22.
That increased level of control will likely come with federal government ownership of key data rights on NGAD.
Over the last decade, “model-based system engineering and digitization moved forward as a model so that we can integrate our design teams between the government and contractors much more effectively and efficiently,” Kendall told a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington, D.C. “Everybody lives in the same design laboratory or design and design environment so we have intimate knowledge of what the contestants/competitors are doing in their design. We’re very involved with them, have separate teams working with each other to preserve their intellectual property.”
“We’re not going to repeat the serious mistake that I think was made with the F-35 program,” he said of the 1990s “total system performance responsibility” approach, which was to reduce total program cost by giving defense contractors the major role of deciding on program trade-offs to meet overall goals.
“The theory then was when a contractor won a program, it owned the program and was going to do the whole life cycle of the program, you know, ‘get government out of that, give it all to the contractor, they know how to do it,'” Kendall said. “What that does is create a perpetual monopoly, and I spent years struggling to overcome acquisition malpractice, and we’re still struggling with that to some degree.”
“We’re not going to do that with NGAD,” he said. “We’re gonna make sure the government has ownership of the intellectual property it needs. We’re also making sure we have modular designs/open systems so we can bring new suppliers in, whoever we choose as the platform integrator. We’ll have a much tighter degree of government control over the future of that program than we’ve had–it’s been a real struggle with the F-35, quite honestly. And it’s not just about the prime. It’s about the subs [subcontractors] too who are just as interested in maintaining their business position as anybody else is.”
The Pentagon wants to leverage the possibility of a five-year Performance-Based Logistics contract award this year to Lockheed Martin to obtain more industry-owned data rights needed for F-35 sustainment (Defense Daily, March 8).
On May 22, Kendall said that the Air Force’s goal on NGAD is to choose a single contractor next year.
“The intent is to go to a single vendor, and I think we’re gonna do that in 2024, assuming we can get appropriation bills on time,” he said.
Last week, the Air Force said that it had released a classified solicitation in expectation of an Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) award for the NGAD manned fighter next year (Defense Daily, May 18).
The NGAD program also includes autonomous drones–Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA). Air Force plans call for 1,000 CCAs to be employed by 200 NGAD manned fighters and 300 F-35As, but the Air Force said last week that CCA is not part of the just announced NGAD source selection for next year’s EMD contract.
Kendall said on May 22 that, in contrast to the NGAD manned fighter, the Air Force is to award contracts to more than one CCA builder.
Asked how many vendors the Air Force plans to have for CCA, Kendall replied, “We haven’t finalized that yet–as many as possible.”
“The answer is it’ll be more than one,” he said. “How many I don’t know…I put out a number of 1,000 CCAs as a planning factor. When you start talking numbers like that, carrying two suppliers longer starts to make more sense so we’ll be looking at what we can afford to carry longer term for CCAs. It’s also a fairly revolutionary capability so I think there’s some pretty strong arguments for not necking down to a single one any earlier than we have to.”