The Pentagon’s new marching orders to buy software as fast as commercial companies do has the contracting workforce feeling a bit anxious, which is a sign that major cultural change is needed, a top defense official said Tuesday.
“I think there was a lot of angst up front” about the March 6 memo, “Directing Modern Software Acquisition to Maximize Lethality,” which told military buyers to use rapid acquisition authorities, Steven Morani, who is acting as the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said at the annual McAleese defense programs conference Tuesday. “We want to shift behavior…We really need a cultural change in how we do business.”
Doing that means using existing tools and authorities, such as commercial software openings and other transaction agreements, to speed up the buying process, as software becomes increasingly intertwined with the Defense Department’s weapons and enterprise systems. Morani said his first exposure to OTAs, which the Army used to buy its augmented-reality goggles, was during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It enabled us to go a lot quicker with white papers that the companies could provide us. It helped us make down-selections much quicker. It helped us get things on contract faster. And once you learned how to use the tool, you didn’t want to go back,” Morani said.
Defense acquisition has long struggled with lengthy timelines that can make technology obsolete before it makes it to troops. Morani said the concern—and main driver of the memo—is that defense-contracting professionals were using the rapid-buying tools as a “workaround more than standard practice,” when the goal is to use them as the “default method.”
“Right now, we have about 85 programs using the software [acquisition] pathway, which is not much. So again, the secretary is really trying to change the behavior and encourage the use of these new pathways,” he said.
Software companies are embracing this new enthusiasm from leadership, especially since the Pentagon has been adamant about broadly adopting AI and autonomous systems.
Ryan Tseng, Shield AI’s CEO and co-founder, called the memo “brilliant.” Being able to update software within 24 hours could “make or break” a mission capability, he said.
“We have some programs where if you want to change the software, it could take us more than a year,” Tseng said during a panel, noting that effectiveness on the battlefield will increasingly be contingent on being able to update weapons systems as easily as phone applications.
But the success of the new effort will come down to enforcement with “robust implementation guidelines,” said Mike Gallagher, the former Wisconsin congressman who now leads Palantir’s defense business.
“We have commercial practices embedded into the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act that go ignored on a near-daily basis,” he said, adding that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new guidance aligns with the decades-old legislation.
Chris Brose, Anduril’s president and strategy chief, agreed, saying it’s crucial to craft requirements to include commercial software capabilities.
“There’s an enormous amount of potential here, enormous excitement. And a lot of companies that are prepared to do this work if the Department of Defense will let them,” Brose said.
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