By Ann Roosevelt
The Army is reworking its request for proposals (RFP) for a new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) Technology Development (TD) phase that incorporates efficiencies sought by DoD leaders to achieve “better buying power.”
“Affordability is an excellent example of one of those areas that we’ve incorporated deliberately to be in concert…certainly where Secretary [Robert] Gates wants us to go as well as where the senior acquisition leadership wants us to go,” Col. Andrew DeMarco, project manager, Ground Combat Vehicle, said in a roundtable.
A Sept. 14 memo from Ashton Carter, under secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, provided specific guidance to achieve Gates’ Efficiencies Initiative.
DeMarco said his office has spent a lot of time revising the RFP and working with acquisition officials in the Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).
Carter’s guidance targets affordability and control cost growth, to “mandate affordability as a requirement,” and specifically mentions the GCV among other top programs he’ll be watching.
As part of the Army’s GCV acquisition strategy and as part of “what we intend on releasing in the new RFP, we’re going to provide industry with affordability targets for manufacturing costs to help shape their trade space as well as to make it more realistic…as well as providing them some targets for [operation and support] O&S costs,” DeMarco said.
In the previously terminated RFP, DeMarco said the Army “would tell [industry] what the target was after we had work started. Our intent for this RFP is to give them a target range and to use that as part of assessing their proposals and making a determination among other factors of who ultimately will be selected for TD,” he said.
The Army also wants potential bidders to consider balanced designs. DeMarco wants industry to think hard about balancing cost, schedule and performance as part of where they’re driving their technical designs in a competitive environment.
At an Oct. 1 Industry Day in Dearborn, Mich., some 300 attendees heard from top Army officials about the tiered requirements approach. The non-tradable-or must haves, the tradable and non-deferrable, and those items that can be deferred.
The four non-negotiable imperatives are capacity, force protection, full spectrum operations and timing, said Michael Smith, director of mounted requirements at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Ft. Benning, Ga., part of Training and Doctrine Command.
For the lesser-included capabilities in the next tier down, the Army is working with OSD to “ensure that we have the required capabilities that will help us to drive to a better solution set at the platform level than what we have right now in any single platform,” Smith said.
Those capabilities are such things as sensors, mobility, lethality, sustainability, a “whole series of ilities,” he said.
Carter will be holding the GCV program tightly accountable as to cost targets. Specifically, he said, at Milestone A, his acquisition decision memorandum approving the formal start of the program, contains an affordability target “to be treated by the program manager like a Key Performance Parameter, not to be sacrificed or compromised without my specific authority.”
Then, at Milestone B, when a systems’ detailed design is begun, Carter will require the presentation of “a systems engineering tradeoff analysis showing how cost varies as the major design parameters and time to complete are varied.”
Another area where Carter specifically points to GCV in his guidance is in schedule–where the initial plan was for a program taking 10 years, “typical of the normal leisurely pace of programs.” The MRAP ATV, he said, “began in 2009 and delivered more than 5,700 vehicles to Afghanistan by August 2010.”
The GCV should have a seven-year schedule to first production vehicle. “Requirements and technology level for the first block of GCVs will have to fit this schedule, not the other way around,” Carter’s memo said.
DeMarco said the Army is still “very much focused on a seven-year timeline.”
Additionally, DeMarco noted that Carter mentions the use of certain types of contracts. “We are in the process of assessing, given where he would like us to go with contract types, where I think he’s indicated whether or not the recommendation to go to fixed price contracts or applicable to this phase but certainly that piece of what he has put out is integral to the strategy going forward whether this RFP for TD, the EMD phase or the Production phase.”
DeMarco said the revised RFP utilizes an incremental, block approach, with the first increment an Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV). The size and shape of that IFV is to meet cost and schedule timelines, similar to that described in the initial RFP.
“I am emphasizing the use of mature technologies, both to attack schedule risk as well as technical risk and shaping of the focus to be on integrating the system, an integrated system driving toward a preliminary design review during the TD phase,” DeMarco said.
The RFP targets a potential 24-month TD phase, focused on risk-reduction.
That will be followed by an about four-year Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase, to provide more test time and design feedback as well as allow for the government developmental and operational needed prior to Milestone C.
The competitive GCV program is expected to award as many as three contracts for TD in the spring of 2011, Potentially two contractors would carry through EMD, and then one contractor is planned to be selected, “at least at this stage,” for production, he said.
Teams led by General Dynamics [GD], BAE Systems and SAIC [SAI] bid on the initial, canceled RFP, now plan their strategies as they await the revised RFP.
Smith said, “We need an infantry fighting vehicle that can deliver a squad to the battlefield, in an IED environment, realistically an environment of anywhere along the continuum of operations under armor.”
“The commitment is there,” DeMarco said.