By Jim Garamone
DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, Jan. 15, 2015 – Secretary of the Air Force
Deborah Lee James announced a new initiative designed to help the Air Force
partner with industry, encourage innovation and drive down the cost of systems.
James announced the Bending the Cost Curve program at the
Atlantic Council here yesterday. She called it a targeted initiative that can
be accomplished within current Air Force budget programs.
The initiative aims to improve dialogue with industry, “so
we can better understand how processes, procedures, and some of the choices we
make can inadvertently contribute to rising costs, the stifling of innovation
and slow processes,” she said.
Different Than Past
It is different than past initiatives in that the Air Force
is looking at very specific, albeit large, programs, James said. Bending the
Cost Curve is about specifics and not generalities, she said.
The initiative has three focus areas -- enhance, expand and
improve, James said.
Enhance looks for the Air Force to better interact with
industry throughout the acquisition lifecycle, she said. Expand, James added,
seeks to increase competition among traditional and non-traditional industry
partners to drive down costs and to increase innovation.
“Improve means we need to carefully examine our own internal
processes and develop mechanisms to drive down costs and to speed up our
acquisitions,” she said.
Cost Capability Analysis
The Air Force is launching a Cost Capability Analysis
program, James said.
“Here’s our thinking: We think that by gathering data from a
range of sources, it should be possible to identify instances where small
changes in capability have large impact on cost,” James said. “This, in turn,
should mean that the Air Force can develop much more affordable weapon
systems.”
For example, she said, if the Air Force has a requirement
for a jet to fly 500 mph, but can achieve significant cost savings by amending
this to 450 mph, officials may use the information to make tradeoffs in how it
develops the request for proposals and evaluation factors. The service may
choose to modify requirements.
The Air Force looked at this before, but there was no way to
incorporate industry, James said. Now there is and the service is aiming this
effort at four programs. They are the T-X jet trainer, the Long-Range Stand-Off
Weapon, the Multi-Adaptive Podded System and the Space-Based Infrared System
follow-on. The Air Force selected these programs “because they represent a
range of use cases and segments of industry,” James said.
“We’re two years away from the T-X request for proposal, and
our new process will allow us to directly engage industry as we develop an
understanding of how to best evaluate our objective and threshold
requirements,” the secretary said.
The other programs are at different acquisition stages and
this will give the Air Force “a powerful comparative for learning the nuances
of how to best engage industry around requirements,” she said.
Expanding Competition
Expanding competition is focused on PlugFest Plus, James
said. A PlugFest is a specialized industry event where companies collaborate
and demonstrate their existing capabilities in live demonstrations for
government customers. But there is no contracting aspect to a PlugFest.
“Under our new PlugFest Plus approach, we will put in place
a mechanism whereby a vendor could walk away with a contract just a few weeks
after an event,” James said. “We accomplish this by combining these industry
events with an Army acquisition model, which minimizes barriers for companies
to participate.”
The first PlugFest Plus is set for January 20 at George
Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “We’ve decided to demonstrate this strategy
with the Air Force Distributed Common Ground System -- a system that produces
intelligence information from data collected by a variety of sensors,” she
said. “If this event proves successful, we will take steps to evolve the
process to other Air Force applications.”
Improving Internal Processes
The Air Force needs to improve internal processes, James
said. In conversations with industry about Bending the Cost Curve, “the
number-one recommendation from corporate CIOs was that the Air Force should
establish a business analytics capability,” she said. “The Air Force needs to get
an enterprise view of our information technology spending so that we can
understand tradeoffs and make wise future investment decisions.”
This is not the case today, and James announced the Air
Force is standing up an IT Business Analytics Office.
With this capability, if the Air Force wants a new database
to do something “we will have a business case, empirical data and metrics to
back that decision up,” she said. “What we’re really after here is a
data-driven approach to spending.”
Similar efforts in the private sector have yielded 25
percent cost savings or more, James said.
Bending the Cost Curve will require the Air Force to be
strategically agile, she said.
“All of this will be hard -- but it’s worth the effort
because we are the best Air Force on the planet and we must keep it that way,”
James said.
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