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A chart of the reformed acquisition system as handed out this afternoon by Undersecretary Ellen Lord.

ARLINGTON: Acquisition undersecretary Ellen Lord is almost finished with her year-long odyssey to rewrite the notoriously cumbersome Pentagon regulations known as DoD 5000, she told the Association of the US Army here.

“We said we were going to do a fundamental rewrite this year of DoD 5000 and we are very close to crossing the finish line on that,” Lord said yesterday. “One of the things I’m most excited about is that we have a separate software pathway…. That policy is in coordination right now in the Pentagon.”

Software isn’t the only kind of acquisition that’s getting its own special process in the new system. “Typically, we’ve talked about one way to do everything,” Lord said. “[In] what we call our adaptive acquisition framework…we’ve broken down different pathways.”

A glossy pamphlet Lord proudly handed out this afternoon listed six pathways to pick from:

Ellen Lord

  • Urgent Operational Needs: rapidly field new capability in less than two years.
  • Middle Tier Acquisition: prototype the new system in less than five years, then turn that prototype into a fielded system in less than five – but with the option to escalate to a more laborious Major Capability Acquisition if required.
  • Major Capability Acquisition: the traditional Pentagon acquisition process, with formal Milestone Decisions (A, B, and C) to proceed from one phase to the next.
  • Software Acquisition: a high-speed pathway with multiple “sprints” in a single year as code is repeatedly revised, tested, and revised again.
  • Defense Business Systems: an alternative pathway tailored to the Pentagon’s extensive back-office information technology.
  • Acquisition of Services: a seven-step process for service contracts, which have long been overshadowed by big weapons programs but actually make up about half of what the Pentagon spends on procurement every year.

Now, many of these authorities and pathways already existed in some form. Especially skillful and daring acquisition officials knew how to customize the cumbersome process to do innovative things and bypass onerous requirements. But most bureaucrats didn’t know how to that, and nobody was teaching them. In fact, they were all too often punished for taking any initiative.

“We have DoD 5000 and we very happily tell everybody, just tailor it down to what you need,” Lord said. “Well, if you don’t know what’s in there and you have been punished in the past, particularly getting called up for hearings on the Hill…you tend to be a tad risk averse —  especially if you don’t have a full understanding of the what the tools are you have to use.”

Lord intends to fix that by accompanying the new policy with a website, new courses at Defense Acquisition University, and detailed guidance documents.

“Part of the guidance is providing vignettes of what right looks like on certain types of acquisitions,” she said. “For certain acquisition authorities, [it suggests] what are the contract types that are the most appropriate and then give an example of when they are used correctly and incorrectly.”

At the same time that Lord is adding new options and instructions, however, she’s cutting the number of regulations. “[We’re] reviewing all of the DFARS [Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement],” she said. “We have a 15 percent reduction so far in the DFARS clauses and we are continuing to beat those back down.”