Many distinguished panels and individuals over the decades have aimed at reforming the defense acquisition process, and observers have already identified most of the problems and have proposed solutions for them. There appears to be remarkable agreement as to the problems that need to be addressed but, so far, not enough ability or agility to address them, according to a 2008 assessment of defense acquisition performance.

The JTRS program faces many of the same problems that trip up other acquisition programs, especially the problems that arise from being a joint program in a service-centric environment. The Department of Defense has attempted to deal with JTRS problems in unique ways. They include:

Technology Immaturity. AMF JTRS competitively awarded development contracts to two industry teams that each took their competing designs to preliminary design review well before Milestone B. Industry also built prototypes. The government then required each team’s proposals for the follow-on system development and demonstration work to show that the technology readiness level (TRL) for critical technologies were at TRL 6—defined as “system/subsystem model or prototype demonstration in a relevant environment”—or better. This allowed the under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics (USD (AT&L)) to certify to Congress that AMF JTRS was one of the first programs to comply with the provisions of 10 U.S.C. 2366b, which represented an attempt by Congress to raise the bar for Milestone B. The new Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 further enhances the importance of technology maturity and competitive prototyping.

Lethargic Acquisition Process. In 2007, USD (AT&L) approved a streamlined process for JTRS to decrease the time and cost to staff documents, thus facilitating faster decisions without sacrificing OSD or service insight or program rigor. The under secretary also delegated final approval of some documents to the JPEO JTRS to facilitate the JPEO’s ability to apply midcourse corrections and more quickly institutionalize lessons learned in acquisition and systems engineering, as needed. After a year in use, an OSD joint analysis team endorsed this process by recommending that JTRS’ “current streamlined procedures be retained.”

Slow Technology Insertion to Meet Urgent Operational Requirements. JTRS produces software defined radios, and much of its capability resides in software. After JTRS delivers a baseline software package, it plans to then develop, integrate, and test enhancements to the baseline software every two to three years via its software in service support (SwISS) process. As recommended by the January 2006 Defense Acquisition Performance Assessment report and other analyses, these enhancements can be heavily influenced by input from users, such as combatant commanders, via the JTRS Tactical Requirements Group, which is part of the SwISS process. Emergency code revisions could be fielded in two to six months. JTRS has an opportunity to take another step to build a powerful new model—an annual operating plan (to supplement the acquisition program baseline) fed by level RDT&E funding to respond to an annual list of COCOM-generated enhancements approved outside the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS).

Creeping Requirements. From program initiation in 2002 through 2005, JTRS had more than 3,000 requirements. Several were extremely challenging and even beyond available technical capability. Others were too vague, and requirements never stabilized. JTRS was not executable, and the success of the 2006 restructuring hinged on deferring many requirements to future JTRS increments and clarifying other requirements. Today, JPEO JTRS and JTRS program managers remain vigilant on both informal (that is, outside the JCIDS process) and formal requirements creep. Several JTRS contracts tie industry’s award fee to its ability to resist disruptive tasking and any growth in contract scope not formally approved by the government procuring contracting officer and program manager. Additionally, the DoDI 5000.02 policy to emphasize key performance parameters, while pushing other requirements to trade space, will embolden JTRS PMs to request requirements relief. A JTRS Configuration Steering Board can facilitate this relief.

Gold-Plated Requirements. JTRS cost estimators are playing a key role in developing the capabilities document for JTRS Increment II; after cost estimators placed a price tag on each iteration of the draft capabilities development document (CDD), another group of “requirements” suddenly disappeared due to their high price. For the draft CDD, this drove the requirements community to realize how difficult/expensive some requirements would be to meet. The result was a distilled list of cheaper, easier-to-develop capabilities that are based on more mature technologies—that is, the 75 percent solution advocated by the secretary of defense in Senate testimony earlier this year. JTRS programs will continue striving for realistic cost estimates on draft requirements, making it easier to predict the cost, schedule and performance outcomes of each round of development, resulting in more stable budgets. These detailed cost estimates will also help the government recognize overly aggressive bidding in industry proposals.

Competition Ends When Development Starts. The radio industry has been a closed, proprietary model: Industry typically retained most software and hardware intellectual property rights, requiring the services to continuously invest with an individual vendor for each capability upgrade. Different radio vendors diluted interoperability and DoD’s ability to leverage economies of scale. Through the JTRS enterprise business model, JTRS increases software reuse and portability because JTRS vendors provide government purpose rights for their historically proprietary software, and standards ensure that JTRS software is consistently applied across several hardware platforms. This increases competition for software upgrades and maintenance, avoids costs, improves and increases interoperability across multiple radio platforms, and allows easier technology insertion and product refresh. In addition, JTRS qualifies at least two production sources for radio sets and competes buys in aggregated lots. (For example, individual components combined their purchases of handheld tactical radios, and in less than 18 months avoided $425 million in costs while buying more than 110,000 JTRS single channel handheld radios.) JTRS encourages radio vendors that do not currently have development contracts to join the competition for future production orders by showing, via government testing, that their radios meet JTRS requirements. Competition has been and continues to be a key tenet of the JTRS enterprise business model.

Joint Acquisition Programs Are Typically Not Well Managed. Shortfalls of the existing joint acquisition process typically include:

• the joint requirements generation process is too slow, and there is often a lack of consensus on requirements;
• joint programs often take longer and cost more than single-service acquisitions;
• single-component programs often have more seniorleader advocacy than do joint programs; and
• OSD oversight of joint programs is strained due to other commitments and lack of staffing.
 

JTRS was initially established as a direct report to USD (AT&L), which provided joint oversight and guidance to the program and to the services. This approach addressed several of these shortfalls, but with the JPEO JTRS returning to an SAE acquisition structure, many of these will need to again be resolved, unless a new set of rules of engagement can be agreed upon initially. An approach for JTRS and other joint programs to have an advocate of a true joint nature would be to create a joint acquisition executive (JAE), as a peer to current component acquisition executives, reporting to USD (AT&L) and that manages only joint programs. The JAE would be the joint technical authority for those joint programs. ♦

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