House Armed Services leaders unveil bill to reform defense acquisition, speed up requirements process

The House Armed Services Committee is yet again trying its hand at reforming the Department of Defense’s acquisition system, often derided as too slow and inefficient in getting warfighters the capabilities they need.

The Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery, or SPEED Act, unveiled Monday, seeks several changes to improve how the department fields systems to troops in a faster manner with more relevant technologies.

While Congress has taken aim many times in the recent past to hasten the delivery of tech to military users, the SPEED act is directly targeting the requirements process left of the procurement cycle.

“As we began to look at the structure of the requirements process, the length of time it takes to move from a warfighter saying that they have a capability gap and need a materiel solution to the time it actually makes over in the hands of the acquisition community, we can be from six to 10 years,” a senior congressional official told reporters Monday. “During the course of that time, the threat has changed, the technology has changed, the political leadership in the nation has changed, and the budget priorities have changed. One of the things that the chair and ranking member had us go do is try to expedite the requirements process.”

In order to shrink that timeline, the bill seeks to alter the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and create a Requirements, Acquisition and Programming Integration Directorate (RAPID). The proposal is to get the JROC out of oversight, renaming it the Joint Requirements Council, which currently serves as a “chokepoint instead of a catalyst,” a summary of the bill states.

If approved, the new JRC will no longer validate specific capability documents, but rather, will focus on assessing evolving threats and technologies to shape future force design and joint operational needs, especially those identified by combatant commanders who are directly in the fight and require urgent capabilities in the face of evolving threats.

“You’ll see some significant changes in the bill with respect to the role of the JROC, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and their current role in validating requirements, looking to move them more to an intake body, listening to the combat commanders, and then rapidly making requirements, alerting the need for a materiel solution, up into a new body that is designed to bring together all key stakeholders,” the senior congressional official said.

RAPID — which would be co-chaired by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office — would assess proposed solutions, evaluate costs, review experimentation results and make recommendations to the deputy secretary of defense much earlier in the requirements process.

The goal behind RAPID is to make an assessment of technologies once they come in and prioritize them to move forward much faster.

“Collectively, these reforms will streamline the requirements process and focus it on addressing capability gaps and urgent needs, rather than prescribing fixed solutions and generating volumes of paperwork. As a result, PEOs and program managers will be unbound from overly prescriptive—and in many cases non-essential—requirements that are all but set in stone once validated by the JROC,” a summary of the bill states. “Instead, PEOs and program managers will be able to iterate quickly and make informed tradeoffs. Moreover, these reforms accelerate the new requirements process to between 90 and 150 days, which is more than five times faster than the current process.”

The legislation overall outlines five pillars for reform:

-Aligning acquisition to warfighter priorities and operational outcomes.

-Accelerating the requirements process.

-Striking the right balance between regulation and efficiency.

-Strengthening the defense industrial base and leveraging commercial innovation.

-Developing a mission-oriented defense acquisition workforce.

In many instances, the bill doesn’t always provide new authorities, but rather, codifies certain practices and provides top cover.

“With our legislation, there’s not a lot of new authority that the department needs. The problem is that they’ve not been using the authorities that they have, because the system has become one that exists to serve itself and it’s very risk averse. You’ve got really good people trying to do really good work, but they’re in a broken system,” the senior congressional official said. “Where it may be just that the department needs the Congress to say, ‘Go do,’ then that’s — that’s another question to be asked.”

The committee wants to be able to fully empower PEOs and program managers to make the necessary decisions.

“One important area where we said we’ve got to fix is having senior acquisition leaders actually have the responsibility to go and make the changes they need. There are many areas where even a two-star PEO may not be fully empowered to make all the decisions he or she may need to make to get something fielded correctly and fast,” another senior congressional official told reporters. “We took a stab at that, and I think we created a new process where the people that should be empowered to make decisions have the actual roles and responsibilities and then can be held accountable.”

Leadership on the Senate Armed Services Committee released legislation in November, similarly aimed at improving innovation and reducing the time it takes to get warfighters new capabilities.

Both panels will have to agree on a final version of reform legislation before it can be enacted.