WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is looking to firm up its ties with industry as part of the Better Buying Power 3.0 initiative, formally launched Thursday after months of anticipation.
The next development in the BBP cycle of acquisition reforms includes a new rule rules requiring industry to get Pentagon sign off before beginning internal R&D projects, as well as a mandate to give industry program requirements earlier in the process.
The moves are part of an attempt to "enhance" the relationship between industry and the Pentagon, Frank Kendall, the department's top weapons buyer, told reporters.
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The first, which could prove controversial, involves stronger government oversight on internal research and development (IRAD) programs run by industry.
"We're going to put a little more regulation in place to tighten the relationship between government and industry with IRAD," Kendall explained. "We're going to leave industry with the flexibility to make decisions about how it invests and make that allowable cost for them, but we want them to be coupled more tightly to the government."
Those regulations, which Kendall said were "pretty minimal," essentially require industry to get a government sponsor to sign off on their IRAD programs and then to report back to that sponsor with findings when the research is done.
Per the BBP directive, Pentagon officials will develop a timeline and guidance for how to implement this new rule over the summer.
Kendall said he's discussed the new rules with some in industry, and said it is his belief this will help enhance communication and industry.
"Having someone in the government who has reviewed your planned work, signed off and said 'yeah, I think that is reasonable work' -- just to find anybody anywhere in the defense department who will do that for you, essentially -- I don't think is a very high hurdle," he said.
As to why tighter regulations on IRAD are needed at all, Kendall said there are some behaviors in industry – which he described as "not general, but there are enough of them of them to make me nervous" – that he was concerned about.
"I've seen some behaviors where people have made, I think, de minimis investments designed more to define intellectual property than to actually advance technology," he said. "We want that balance restored a little bit. The other places where people are in some cases asserting they will use future IRAD expenditures to lower the evaluated price on a big, that's not what we want people to do with IRAD."
The initiative also includes a change that industry will not doubt welcome: a mandate to give industry draft requirements earlier in the process.
"In general we need to have a better exchange of information with industry," Kendall said. "We need to ask industry to exercise their creative energy and do concept definition work for us early on before we finalize our requirements."
"I think all of this will lead to better ideas, more realistic requirements and earlier identification of direction or the department to go in that will allow industry to make some of their own investments to be competitive at the same time," he added.
The Air Force has seen early success with sharing early draft requirements with industry, particularly on its T-X trainer replacement program. Industry has praised the service for how it communicated in the months leading up to its final requirements release in late March.
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Brig. Gen. Dawn Dunlop, director of plans, programs and requirements at Air Education & Training Command, highlighted the benefits of such conversations for the service during a March 26 interview.
"A more deliberate and open dialogue with industry [helps] to better inform government decisions to get a better-capable, lower- cost platform for the DoD," Dunlop said. "We could not have done what we have done in the last year [with developing requirements] if we hadn't been already engaged with industry."
Overall, Kendall said, BBP 3.0 is working to "remove some of the bureaucratic burdens" on industry.
Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.
