“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Josh Luckenbaugh, Staff Writer
“The Pentagon can’t take the years it normally does writing capability requirements as today’s technology will already be irrelevant by then.
Approaches include changing the way requirements are written, capturing them in “concise, high-level needs statements in place of the detailed, prescriptive requirements documents used in the past”
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“The Defense Department needs better ways to acquire software at the speed of relevance, and while individual services or agencies are making progress, there are hurdles to achieving the requisite agility across the Pentagon, government and industry officials said recently.
Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he wants to see the Defense Department “operate at the speed of relevance” and “design a process that takes the lessons learned from places like Ukraine and the Red Sea and says, ‘Listen, we can change on a daily basis.’ And that means change the Pentagon from a hardware-centric organization to a software-centric organization and make sure they are … more efficient in acquiring software.”
This will be challenging for the department “because software is a dynamic acquisition; it’s going to change tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after,” Wittman said at the recent Second Front Systems’ Offset Symposium. The Pentagon can’t take the years it normally does writing capability requirements as today’s technology will already be irrelevant by then, he said.
Corey Jaskolski, CEO of RAIC Labs, said software innovation in industry is “on literally a daily cycle, and you see some of the stuff coming out that I think is really impactful to the mission, but has a hard time getting” into the hands of military operators.
One reason is the lack of opportunities to experiment, Jaskolski said at the conference. While the Defense Department and intelligence community host some coding challenges and hackathons, “I think we need a lot more than that.”
“I think we need domains … where software can be deployed and [tested] out, and I think we need that broadly across DoD and [intelligence community] because that is how the best, most innovative solutions rise to the top,” he said. “There’s so much noise” in software development, and effective testing is the best way to cut through that noise.
“That’s how we test new tools in industry to make sure that they’re actually going to be useful and not just noisy, and I think the ability to sort of more openly be able to test and compare these things, not just through these hackathons but through an environment where people can test things … easily across these different domains is really what’s needed,” he said.
Derek Strausbaugh, Defense Department mission team leader at Microsoft, said another challenge is the “stratification and separation of companies … on these various programs and projects rather than bringing performers and companies together on these projects.”
“Agility gets compromised” if various industry teams are off doing different things and then “we’re supposed to all smush it together in the end. That fails nine times out of 10,” Strausbaugh said at the conference. “That is something I see fail time and time and time again, not only from an acquisition perspective but just from an orchestration perspective” doing large software development efforts where it’s assumed “that it will all come together at the end.”
“That’s also where you see sort of the dark mark getting put beside the innovation side of things,” he added. “‘Well, that didn’t work, so we would have been better off staying where we were."
The Army in March announced a new policy the service hopes will bring its software development processes more “in line with industry best practices,” a press release stated.
Margaret Boatner, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for strategy and acquisition reform, said the new policy has two main goals: institutionalize modern software development approaches and reform legacy research-and-development processes “that really prohibited our ability to adopt and actually employ modern approaches.”
Some of the modern approaches include changing the way requirements are written, capturing them in “concise, high-level needs statements in place of the detailed, prescriptive requirements documents used in the past”; continuously involving soldiers in the requirements process; maximizing use of the Software Acquisition Pathway that is tailored for rapid and iterative delivery; employing flexible contracting strategies; reducing duplicative test requirements and streamlining cybersecurity processes; and planning for continuous improvement and development over the entirety of a software-based system’s life cycle rather than “follow the traditional process in which a system transitions to sustainment once development is complete,” the release stated.
“We really feel that the modern approaches are going to give us” a “competitive advantage on the battlefield,” Boatner said during a media roundtable in May. “So, the ability to rapidly develop and, importantly, enhance our software-based capabilities over time, these modern approaches are really what’s going to enable that.”
Donald Gansberger, software director at AFWERX, said getting the Defense Department to embrace new approaches to software development and acquisition is critical.
“It’s not just so much about getting contracts and getting one widget into a warfighter’s hands. That’s a victory, we’ll take it, but the most important thing is innovating the department as a whole … so that the culture” shifts to a point where program offices across the Pentagon are becoming more innovative, Gansberger said at the symposium.
“Getting innovative software to the warfighter is extremely difficult,” he said. “It’s hard to get innovations at speed and scale to the entire force that have any sort of operational, tactical or strategic-level impact.”
Matt Glinski, program manager at AFWERX, said a key part of that culture change will be fostering a “symbiotic relationship between operational units as well as the innovation/contracting and acquisitions community.”
“The thing I run into the most is, ‘That’s an acquisition thing, or that’s an innovation thing, or an ops thing,’” he said. “Well … one doesn’t come before the other.”
Having people from each community work together and communicate their priorities with one another will lead to “real outcomes” for the warfighter, he said.”
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