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11 Apr 19. U.S. and UAE Hold 4th Joint Military Dialogue. Senior delegations from the United States and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) met Apr. 9-10 in Washington, D.C. for the fourth meeting of the Joint Military Dialogue (JMD). The JMD is the premier bilateral defense forum for coordinating defense cooperation, identifying shared security objectives and consulting on a wide array of strategic issues. The delegations discussed a broad range of defense challenges, including counterterrorism; border and maritime security; air and missile defense; and security cooperation.
The United States and UAE remain committed to a strong bilateral relationship built on common interests and mutual respect. The defense relationship has served as one of the key foundations of the broader strategic partnership for nearly 40 years. The UAE reflects the mutual commitment to cooperation and consultation based on shared priorities.
Specific discussions focused on efforts to counter regional threats, expand planning and training regimes, and the U.S.-UAE Defense Cooperation Roadmap. The United States welcomed the Emiratis’ willingness to burden-share and lead in supporting joint regional security objectives. The U.S. delegation was led by Under Secretary of Defense for Policy John Rood. The UAE delegation was led by Vice Chairman of the Armed Forces Lt. Gen Eisa al Mazrouie. (Source: US DoD)
09 Apr 19. Thornberry To Introduce Two Pentagon Reform Bills In May Ahead Of HASC NDAA Markup. The ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee is planning to introduce two Pentagon acquisition reform bills ahead of his committee’s markup of the fiscal year 2020 defense authorization act, including an effort to push the department to improve engagement with small- and mid-sized businesses.
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) told reporters the two bills, one to push DoD to enact previously approved reforms and another to ease acquisition hurdles, will arrive a month before the HASC National Defense Authorization Act markup drops in June.
“One of them will be about implementing what we have already passed, and pushing that along. The second one will be related to innovation, especially small and mid-sized businesses,” Thornberry said.
Thornberry said he particularly wants DoD to improve its ability of doing business with “small, innovative, disruptive sorts of companies.”
“We make it too hard, and the incentives are just not there. Part of what I’m trying to focus on is how can we do more in that area, so that we can take advantage of the tremendous innovation that’s occurring in the private sector,” the ranking member said.
A second bill will push the Pentagon to address specific reforms in the previous NDAA that it has yet to enact, including addressing plans to save costs by making adjustments to its Fourth Estate offices, such as the Defense Information Systems Agency.
“It’s certainly a possibility that for Fourth Estate reforms we would look at things to push them along in the implementation,” Thornberry said. “We do have some sticks, and some carrots. We’re going to try put a mixture of those things together.”
Thornberry said the Pentagon missed a February deadline to address Fourth Estate reforms, and he planned to meet with department officials this week to discuss a plan moving forward. Fencing in future funds is one potential option that may be included in the bill to push DoD
toward enacting previously approved reforms. Thornberry said he wants both pieces of legislation to arrive in May with enough time to
potentially work similar provisions into the NDAA markup by June. (Source: Defense Daily)
08 Apr 19. US designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a foreign terrorist organisation. Trump administration moves to ratchet up pressure on regime. The designation would deprive the Revolutionary Guard of funding and make supporting it a criminal offence. The US has designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organisation, ratcheting up pressure on the country over its alleged efforts to sow instability in the Middle East. The move, announced on Monday, is the first time the US has named part of another government a terrorist organisation, according to the White House. In a statement, the White House said its decision would “significantly expand the scope and scale of our maximum pressure on the Iranian regime”. Iran’s economy is buckling under the pressure of American sanctions that were applied by the Trump administration after the US last year pulled out of the Obama-era nuclear deal. The Revolutionary Guard is responsible for carrying out Iranian regional policies that Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, described as “malign activities”.
Chief among them are Iran’s support for Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria and Hizbollah in Lebanon, together with its push for a ballistic missile programme. A senior US administration official said US president Donald Trump has “long believed” the Revolutionary Guard should be designated a terrorist organisation. Officials said the new designation would deprive the group of funding and make supporting it a criminal offence. Brian Hook, the state department’s Iran envoy, said the move served as “an additional layer of sanctions” to “make radioactive those elements of the Iranian economy linked to the IRGC”. “We are stigmatising this organisation, we are highlighting to the world the perils of working with the IRGC,” said Mr Hook. “This is just another chapter and there are more chapters to come.” Mr Pompeo said the US would “bring all pressure to bear” on Iran. “The leaders of Iran are racketeers, not revolutionaries,” said Mr Pompeo. In response, Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a letter to President Hassan Rouhani that his country should designate US Central Command as a terrorist organisation. The call was immediately accepted by the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security body, which is headed by the president. A business executive close to hardline forces said the designation of the Guard as a terrorist organisation would end up boosting its role in foreign policy. “The guards now can mobilise the whole country behind it by saying they are directly targeted by the enemy,” he said.
The Revolutionary Guard was established after the 1979 revolution in parallel to the conventional army to protect the Islamic establishment from domestic and foreign threats. The 120,000-strong force, which also has millions of voluntary members, has used its mandate to turn itself into a commercial powerhouses, building a large presence in energy and construction projects and the importation of consumer goods. Iranian analysts say existing US sanctions have already helped the Revolutionary Guard to tighten its grip on the economy by hurting private sector businesses in a way that opens up opportunities for the guard to gain market share. Last month the US Treasury imposed fresh sanctions on people connected to the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, a group that US officials claim is connected to Iran’s previous efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Washington’s pressure campaign on Iran has intensified tensions between the US and its European allies, who, while still concerned about Iran, have argued that Tehran has upheld the terms of the nuclear deal. Iran has made clear that it has no intention of negotiating a new deal. The other signatories to the agreement have continued to adhere to it, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has found no evidence that Iran has breached the terms of the deal. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister who is fighting for another term in elections on Tuesday, tweeted “thank you” to Mr Trump, writing: “Once again you are keeping the world safe from Iran aggression and terrorism.” (Source: FT.com)
08 Apr 19. HASC Chair Reintroduces Bill to End Sequestration. House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) has reintroduced the Relief from Sequestration Act to repeal automatic cuts for discretionary and mandatory spending, he said in an April 4 press release. The bill would end the prospect of sequestration for fiscal years 2020 and 2021, the final two years that are subject to the automatic spending cuts under the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA). Smith previously introduced the bill at the beginning of the 115th Congress in 2017. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) introduced it at the beginning of the 114th Congress in 2015. “These cuts have impacted our economy, affected our government, and harmed our nation,” Smith said in the Thursday release. He noted that Congress has previously delayed the BCA’s $1.2trn in cuts from fully taking effect. The sole year that the automatic cuts were triggered was fiscal year 2013.
“As sequestration has proven, haphazard cuts are not effective in reducing the debt. Any sustainable fiscal plan should include a thoughtful budgeting approach that incorporates targeted reductions and increases in revenue.”
Pentagon leaders have frequently cited sequestration as the number-one threat to military readiness. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said during a Thursday Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that a potential return to automatic spending cuts in FY ’20 would affect $29bn in procurement and research-and-development programs or in operations and
maintenance efforts. House Democrats on Tuesday unveiled a two-year spending bill that would raise the spending limits imposed by the Budget Control Act, rather than eliminate them altogether. The Investing
for the People Act of 2019 sets the defense cap for 2020 at $664bn – a 2.6 percent increase over the enacted 2019 cap of $576bn – and $680bn for 2021. (Source: Defense Daily)
04 Apr 19. What The 809 Panel Didn’t Quite Get Right: Greenwalt & Levine. The Section 809 panel offers an important new idea on how the defense acquisition system could be improved to provide the Pentagon greater access to innovative new technologies that are rapidly developed in the private sector. But the panel fumbled its recommendations with a contradictory and incoherent legislative approach that would hurt more than it helps. That should not undermine the significance of the panel’s underlying idea: a new focus on the source of funding for commercial items instead of the marketplace in which they are sold. This could encourage companies to develop defense-unique products at their own expense. Today, many are driven away when they are forced to accept regulated pricing and burdensome, government-unique contract terms and conditions.
Successes and Failures
We had high hopes when we helped to write the commercial buying acquisition reforms in the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 and the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996. These reforms broadened the definition of commercial items, established a commercial item preference, and authorized waivers to government-unique requirements and contract clauses for the purchase of commercial solutions.
As a result, the government went from 476 contracts under simplified commercial item procedures in 1996 to nearly 13 million contracts worth almost $75bn in 2011. As our colleague Jon Etherton has explained, this enabled the U.S. government to catch up with the information technology revolution that had swept the private sector in the 1990s and likely saved the Department of Defense (DOD) billions of dollars by avoiding unnecessary research and development and the extended acquisition lead times associated with government-unique products.
Despite initial successes, the full promise of the commercial item reforms has not been achieved. Our first disappointment has been the failure by the U.S. government and DoD to waive burdensome government-unique contract clauses and legal requirements for commercial items and commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) products. Strong legislative authorities designed to eliminate these clauses went largely unused, leading their total number to almost triple, from 57 in 1995 to 165 today.
Our second disappointment has been the stagnation and even reversal of Pentagon efforts to use the commercial item preference as a means to bring commercial innovation into the department. The Inspector General’s insistence on the need for cost data on commercial contracts has been emblematic of this problem. One company was even pushed to the extreme of using the judicial process to ensure that the DoD would consider its commercial solutions.
Our greatest disappointment, however, has been the department’s inability to incentivize commercial firms to develop and tailor commercial processes and solutions to meet the military’s needs. We had hoped that commercial items legislation would empower it to seek out and encourage innovative commercial approaches to government-unique problems. Instead, it has too often thrown bureaucracy at the problem by insisting on traditional processes and pricing approaches that drive commercial companies away from the defense market.
As a result, the government often trails the private sector by a decade or more in access to commercial innovation. Some innovative companies are not willing to do business with the Department at all, while others insist on selling through separate subsidiaries and middlemen – an approach that burdens the acquisition process, undermines agility, and stifles innovation. Some of these obstacles have been overcome through the use of flexible Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs), but the overuse of OTAs could lead to abuses and legislative restrictions that limit the future availability of this critical acquisition tool.
We expected the Section 809 panel to address these problems by reviewing acquisition regulations in the same way the Section 800 panel of the 1990s reviewed acquisition legislation, making specific recommendations on requirements and contract clauses that should be waived for COTS and commercial items, and explaining on a case-by-case basis why they shouldn’t apply. The panel missed an opportunity to improve the federal acquisition system when it failed to take on this challenge.
A Failed Attempt
The Section 809 panel completed its work earlier this year, producing a three-volume report of more than 2,400 pages. Instead of reviewing existing statutes and regulations, the panel sought to re-envision broad acquisition issues, such as the structure of the defense acquisition organization, the composition of the acquisition workforce, and the workings of the department’s funding allocation system and the congressional appropriations and reprogramming processes.
One of the areas on which the panel placed the greatest emphasis—revisiting it in all three volumes of the report—was the idea of a “dynamic marketplace,” in which different sets of acquisition rules would apply to different categories of sellers. Unfortunately, the panel’s views on the dynamic marketplace fluctuated wildly over time. The panel called for repealing the special treatment of COTS items in Volume 1 of its report, only to recommend the establishment of a new category of “readily available products”—essentially the same thing — in Volume 3. In Volume 1, the panel recommended separate definitions of commercial products and commercial services (a recommendation that Congress has now followed), only to recommend eliminating these definitions entirely in Volume 3.
The panel initially proposed a marketplace centered on four separate acquisition “lanes,” as suggested by Ben Fitzgerald in his 2016 paper on the “Future Foundry.”These four lanes roughly parallel the existing system of COTS (or readily available) items, commercial items, customized commercial items, and defense-unique items, but with an openness to modifications and updates. Volumes 2 and 3 of the report changed course, proposing to collapse the marketplace into three lanes, with just a single middle lane between the extremes of readily available items and defense-unique items.
In more than 100 pages of discussion, however, the panel failed to come up with a workable definition for this middle lane. The panel defined the middle lane to include any readily-available product that could be modified to meet DoD needs “using commercial processes and equipment.” But it never explained what commercial processes and equipment are. If commercial processes and equipment mean the processes and equipment used by private sector companies, this definition could include virtually everything that DoD buys. For example, an F-16, a product that already exists and can be ordered with no customization, appears to be a “readily-available” product. A Joint Strike Fighter, which is being developed and modified with the processes and equipment of a private sector corporation, might be a readily available product “with customization.”
The panel tried to reverse ground by saying that “defense-unique” development (the third lane) includes any product, the development of which is wholly or partially financed by DoD to serve a defense-unique need. If this definition covers any DOD-financed modification of a commercial product, it would reverse existing provisionsproviding commercial item treatment for the purchase of products with modifications of a type customarily available in the commercial marketplace, or minor modifications made to meet government requirements.
Under this approach, the first government dollar spent to convert a Boeing 767 into a tanker aircraft would make the entire aircraft a defense-unique item. Streamlined commercial purchasing procedures would no longer be possible for “green aircraft”or military-hardened electronics. Worse still, commercial software, which almost always requires modification to meet military requirements, would be subject to the full range of DoD-specific contract terms and conditions. As a consequence, some companies would no longer sell cutting-edge technology to DOD at all, even as this technology remained available to other customers, including foreign militaries.
The panel appears to have believed that its definitions of “readily available” and “defense-unique” products were mutually exclusive, but this is not the case. If, in fact, a particular product is covered by both definitions, which set of rules is supposed to apply? Are the streamlined procedures supposed to be applied to everything or to nothing—or is there some invisible line between the two that we cannot see? The panel’s grand design falls apart because it cannot answer these basic questions.
A Major Improvement
It does not have to be this way. The Section 809 panel had an important idea: that the source of funding should be considered in determining whether or not a product is commercial. If the panel’s idea could be applied to improve the existing system, rather than wasted in a fruitless effort to reinvent acquisition from the ground up, the change would improve the government’s access to technology, rather than confusing it.
The existing definitions of COTS and commercial items have the advantage of 25 years of practice and precedent to assist in their application. They expressly address the issues of minor modifications and commercial modifications on which the panel stumbled so badly, enabling the department to purchase a broad array of commercial items under streamlined procedures. These definitions, however, are based on a narrow, buyer’s perspective of commercial items. The underlying idea is that if a product has been tested in the commercial marketplace, the government should be able to rely on the product and the price and can safely use simplified procedures and commercial pricing.
The panel’s source-of-funding approach, by contrast, views commerciality from a seller’s perspective. The underlying idea is that if a product is developed exclusively at private expense, the seller has earned the right to sell it at commercial prices without having to accept burdensome government-unique terms and conditions, regardless of whether the product is tested in the commercial marketplace or is available to other buyers. If adopted, this seller’s perspective would provide its own advantages to the government, encouraging commercial entities to invest their own funds in innovative solutions to DoD problems.
If a private company is willing to design a capable new defense-unique software product or space system for DoD at its own expense, the military is likely to benefit, even if it has to pay commercial prices. The U.S. military needs private sector innovation today more than ever—especially in advanced technology areas like artificial intelligence, communications, sensors, and advanced software, where commercial technology is evolving at a rate far faster than the DoD development cycle. At a time when the Pentagon is desperately seeking new tools to gain faster access to private sector innovation, the source-of-funding approach, with its seller’s perspective, could open a promising new acquisition pathway.
Fortunately, this is a case where DoD can have its cake and eat it too. Rather than throwing out the existing commercial item provisions and trying to address every difficult definitional issue from scratch, Congress and the department have the option of retaining the existing definitions and adding on new categories of commercial items based on source-of-funding. This combined approach would enable the Pentagon to benefit from both the certainty provided by the existing buyer-based commercial item categories and the innovation that would be encouraged by the new seller-based commercial item categories.
The new category of commercial items could, as the Section 809 panel suggested, cover any product that is developed exclusively at private expense, without the investment of a single federal dollar (including independent research and development). Such products would be purchased under streamlined commercial procedures, even if they have a defense-unique purpose and will never be tested in the commercial marketplace. If the development has already been completed, the product would be treated as a COTS item; if the product is not yet available but development will be completed exclusively at private expense, it would be treated as a commercial item. In either case, commercial item preferences would apply.
In fact, the Department might choose to go a step farther and enable even traditional government contractors to compete in this new innovative arena by offering their own products that are developed exclusively at private expense, without any government-financed development. To achieve this, DOD would have to establish a new category of funding—not independent research and development (IR&D), which is highly subsidized by the Department, but self-funded research and development(SFR&D), which would not be reimbursed.
Conclusion
DOD is already behind the commercial market in several of the technologies identified in the National Defense Strategy as keys to future defense applications. Due to the globalization of the commercial market, these dual-use technologies—which will be even more important as future force multipliers and differentiators—are now, and will continue to be, available to U.S. adversaries. However, without reform, new incentives, and new acquisition tools, the fruits of this commercial innovation may not be available.
Currently, DoD’s processes prevent most of the commercial sector from partnering with the government. Government-unique requirements serve as a barrier to firms that might be willing to develop products that we need at their own expense, assuming developmental risk as they do for their commercial customers. Commercial companies may be willing to sell their off-the-shelf wares to the Pentagon, but they won’t modify that technology to meet our needs, because that could trigger government-unique requirements. The Section 809 panel correctly recognized that DoD needs these companies to not only modify their items, but also use their commercial developmental processes and commercially-trained scientists and engineers to solve some of our unique defense problems.
While OTAs are lowering barriers to fill some of DoD’s innovation needs, the use of an exceptional tool like them is not a sustainable approach. Treating self-funded research and development as a commercial item for government contracting purposes has the advantage of a defensible rationale that is built into its structure. The result would be to open up commercial markets, making more companies willing to do business with DOD. This would be a win-win for the military and the U.S. industrial base: companies would be able to sell defense-unique products that are tailored and modified to meet DoD needs without burdensome regulatory requirements and the department would gain access to private sector innovation. It is an idea too good to lose sight of in a 2,400-page report. (Source: glstrade.com/Breaking Defense.com)
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About Lincad
Lincad is a leading expert in the design and manufacture of batteries, chargers and associated products for a range of applications across a number of different sectors. With a heritage spanning more than three decades in the defence and security sectors, Lincad has particular expertise in the development of reliable, ruggedised products with high environmental, thermal and electromagnetic performance. With a dedicated team of engineers and production staff, all product is designed and manufactured in-house at Lincad’s facility in Ash Vale, Surrey. Lincad is ISO 9001 and TickITplus accredited and works closely with its customers to satisfy their power management requirements.
Lincad is also a member of the Joint Supply Chain Accreditation Register (JOSCAR), the accreditation system for the aerospace, defence and security sectors, and is certified with Cyber Essentials, the government-backed, industry supported scheme to help organisations protect themselves against common cyber attacks. The majority of Lincad’s products contain high energy density lithium-ion technology, but the most suitable technology for each customer requirement is employed, based on Lincad’s extensive knowledge of available electrochemistries. Lincad offers full life cycle product support services that include repairs and upgrades from point of introduction into service, through to disposal at the end of a product’s life. From product inception, through to delivery and in-service product support, Lincad offers the high quality service that customers expect from a recognised British supplier.
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