WASHINGTON — Army Secretary Dan Driscoll doubled down on his stance this week that the Army is looking to do less business with traditional prime defense contractors and more deals with smaller, Silicon Valley-like vendors. This comes on the heels of the Army’s decision to launch a complete rework of its acquisition structure, which Breaking Defense first reported earlier this week.
“It used to be 90 percent of things we bought were purpose-built for the military or the Army, and 10 percent were off the shelf,” Driscoll said Wednesday at a media roundtable. “The defense industrial base broadly, and the primes in particular, conned the American people and the Pentagon and the Army into thinking that it needed military specific solutions, when in reality, a lot of these commercial solutions are equal to or better, and we’ve actually harmed ourselves with that mentality.”
But this way of doing things is no longer, especially if the big primes don’t start operating more efficiently, he said, as the goal is to get weapons systems and platforms delivered to soldiers much faster.
“So what we are trying to do is flip it to 90 percent being commercially available and 10 percent being specific in the worst of cases, because when you actually start to think about what large-scale conflict looks like, you cannot scale one-off solutions as quickly and easily as you can scale commercially available things.”
But Driscoll also acknowledged that the primes are not always to blame, as the Army has a history of being a less-than-perfect customer.
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“When I meet with [primes], I highlight how bad of a customer we have been and the characteristics that they have today, we created and incentivized over a long period of time. I appreciate that it’s so difficult to build against our demand signal, and it requires such a balance sheet to outlast all of our insane processes, that I can appreciate that from their perspective,” Driscoll said.
“But when I sit with them, and when [Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George] sits with them, and when we talk to them very openly, and they’re almost all honorable, patriotic people, we stress to them that their system has changed, and you will no longer be able to do that in the United States Army.”
Doing more business with nontraditional vendors is part of the Army’s plans to make sprawling changes to its acquisition structure, which mark the biggest buying shakeup the service has seen in years. The revamp will see a host of consolidations, including a reduction in the number of general officers at the top rank; the contraction of the 12 Program Executive Offices (PEOs) in charge of acquisition; an entirely new reporting structure up the chain; and a larger emphasis on doing business with commercial and private enquiry companies.
Related: EXCLUSIVE: The Army is changing its acquisition structure. Here are the details.
These changes also echo remarks made by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth last week. Hegseth on Nov. 7 spoke to a group of defense CEOs and military program officials to highlight the switch to doing more business with commercial companies — even if their solutions are not completely compliant with the Army’s requirements.
“It means that we will be open to buying the 85 percent solution and iterate together over time to achieve the 100 percent solution. It also means there will be no non compliant bids,” Hegseth said, repeating twice that the department wants to “increase acquisition risk in order to decrease operational risk.”
Also at Wednesday’s roundtable, George said that the Army has already started incorporating commercial products into its systems, specifically General Motor’s engines for the service’s infantry squad vehicles (ISVs), adding that it is looking at Caterpillar engines for the M1E3, the Army’s next-generation Abrams tank.
“There are companies out there that do this that we can definitely take advantage of, and that’s what we’re doing,” George said. “I think that we have a lot of opportunities on the commercial side, and we’re working with the other companies that we’ve been working with [the primes], and what’s been refreshing to me is they’re all working together as well, and they know that we got to get after speed.”