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07 Nov 22. Agency Set to Exceed Small Business, Procurement Goals.
The Defense Department’s leading logistics agency is still meeting small business goals despite a shrinking defense industrial base.
For the 10th consecutive year, the Defense Logistics Agency is set to exceed its DOD-assigned target by obligating over 40% of its contracts to small businesses against a 35.1% objective. DLA also topped its 3% goal in the historically underutilized business zone category at 3.5%.
“We do a really fantastic job here at DLA with small business set-asides that allow only small companies to compete for requirements in support of the warfighters,” said Dwight Deneal, DLA’s director of small business programs.
Spare parts and other consumables that need routine replacement make up a large part of DLA’s purchases, he said. Since large businesses and original equipment manufacturers don’t consider such items profitable, the agency leans heavily on small businesses to sell such items. Connecting small businesses with DLA contracts has become a somewhat repeatable process except when customers need items with no source or technical data, Deneal said. That makes it critical for DLA to find new ways of identifying businesses capable of meeting unique or sudden requirements.
“One of the questions we’ve worked to answer in our strategic planning efforts is: How do we open the aperture to ensure we’re a partner of choice for small businesses?” Deneal said.
Part of the answer: Simplify and demystify processes. The agency has held virtual outreach sessions for years, but members of DLA’s small business team recently expanded the topics to break down challenging steps and attract more companies. In fiscal 2022, over 640 companies tuned in to learn basics like how to search for and submit quotes for potential contracts as well as how to navigate more complicated actions such as seeking approval to source specific military items. Small, disadvantaged businesses were most interested in the sessions, followed by women-owned businesses; HUBZone businesses; and service disabled, veteran-owned businesses.
The team also follows up each event with one-on-one meetings between companies and supply chain managers to help business owners know where their products and services fit, as well as what requirement may be on the horizon.
“Having an outreach program that allows for that kind of targeted dialog is part of strengthening and deepening our industry engagement with small businesses,” Deneal said.
He also conducts one-hour coaching sessions every Friday morning with new companies still learning how to plug into federal contracts and seasoned vendors seeking advice on how to position their companies to partner with DLA.
Reaching out to companies that have government contracts in areas where DLA historically spends a lot of money is another new strategy.
“These are sector-focused outreach efforts where we offer companies that are already doing work for the federal government — but not with DLA — the chance to learn more about us and how they might fit into our business model,” Deneal said.
External outreach at defense manufacturing conferences helps, too. In early October, Deneal attended the Army’s annual meeting and exposition in Washington, D.C., where he participated in a panel discussion on small business challenges.
DLA’s Small Business Innovation Program has also become a model for matching vendors with requirements. Program manager Denise Price said it gives small businesses the chance to eliminate gaps in parts for weapons systems. A Colorado company was recently awarded a contract that resolved reliability issues for a variable frequency drive used to control temperature in the communications trailer of Patriot missiles.
Contracts for over 500 national stock numbered items have been awarded through the program.
“These projects enable weapons system program managers and service program office personnel to engage directly with small business industry to innovate and enhance system performance,” Price said.
Goals for fiscal 2023 are still being determined, but Deneal is already focusing his team on overcoming the decline in DLA’s supplier base by increasing contracts with underserved business communities in addition to HubZones. The process will be twofold.
“It involves finding two or more socioeconomically underserved businesses that can do business with us and recognizing that even within our current pool of vendors there are some that fit in the underserved category but aren’t using set-asides that allow them specifically to compete,” he said.
Increasing equity for underserved small businesses and using existing programs to help them compete for requirements is a priority for the current administration.
Deneal added that small businesses have a role in supporting whole-of-government customers as well as warfighters.
“When you don’t have a plethora of industrial base companies it becomes more of a challenge to set up long-term contracts that have surge capacity built in to support both our military and whole-of-government partners at the speed of need,” he said. (Source: US DoD)
07 Nov 22. Congress poised to back multiyear weapons purchases, LaPlante says. The Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer said he expects Congress to approve new authorities and spending to expand U.S. weapons production in a manner unseen since the Cold War.
To help Ukraine fight Russia and to refill U.S. stockpiles, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Bill LaPlante has for several months called for the Pentagon to receive multiyear contracting authorities for munitions that are typically reserved for Navy vessels and major aircraft.
At a broader discussion at George Mason university last week, LaPlante said he believes Congress will grant the authority and the corresponding dollars.
“They are supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base ― and I’m talking bns of dollars into the industrial base ― to fund these production lines,” LaPlante said of lawmakers Friday. “That, I predict, is going to happen, and it’s happening now. And then people will have to say: ‘I guess they were serious about it.’ But we have not done that since the Cold War.”
Last month, Senate Armed Services Committee leaders introduced a bipartisan amendment that would grant the Pentagon wartime procurement powers, allowing it to buy massive amounts of high-priority munitions. The Senate is expected to vote on the underlying bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, this month.
As drafted, the amendment would let the Pentagon lock in purchases of certain munitions made by Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, BAE Systems, and Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace over fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, a step aimed at encouraging manufacturers to expand production lines for sought-after munitions.
In spite of the bns of dollars in U.S. weapons sent to Ukraine over recent months, some defense firms have said the necessary funding to boost weapons production hasn’t materialized. LaPlante seemed to support that view, saying the starting gun for industry will be formal contracting action by the government.
“Once they see we’re going to put money against it and it’s credible, they’ll get it. Their job is to see where we’re putting our money and to try to capture it,” he said of defense executives. “All that matters is [request for proposals], the contract and the funding. We have not contracted and put in RFPs and [acquisition] strategies assuming large-scale production numbers.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in Brussels last month pushed to galvanize allied defense-industrial bases “to fire up production for the systems to defend Ukraine, even while meeting our own security needs.” There, LaPlante chaired a group of more than 40 national armaments directors to iron out common problems ― and one of them is that foreign defense firms are also questioning the durability of the Ukraine support effort.
“What industry means, and I get this, is: ‘Are you serious? Sure, you’re going to put a bunch of money against this now during the crisis, but two years from now, you’re going to leave me holding the bag,’” LaPlante said.
Congress already greenlit more than $60 bn in aid to Ukraine, but continuing support has become an issue in U.S. midterm elections, set for Nov. 8. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy warned last month that Republicans will not write a “blank check” for Ukraine if they win back the House majority, reflecting his party’s growing skepticism.
For Pentagon acquisitions, LaPlante said, the crisis in Ukraine ought to inject a new focus on whether a weapon is easily mass produced and functions as well as whether troops can be trained on it quickly ― and whether it’s applicable in the Pacific.
Those factors should be part of conversations about the viability of developmental projects that rely on emerging technologies or nontraditional avenues like the Defense Innovation Unit and other transaction authorities.
“If somebody gives you a really cool, liquored-up story about a DIU or OTA, ask him when it’s going to production; ask him how many numbers; ask him what the [unit cost] is going to be; ask him about work against China,” La Plante said. “Ask them all those questions because that’s what matters.”
“The tech bros aren’t helping us too much in Ukraine; they want to,” he added. “Ukraine is not holding their own against Russia with quantum [computing], they’re not they’re not holding their own with [artificial intelligence]. They’re not ― whatever your favorite gadget is. It’s hardcore production of really serious weaponry.” (Source: Defense News)
07 Nov 22. New Strategy Seeks to Reinvigorate Deterrence in a Changing World. The challenge of the National Defense Strategy is to ensure U.S. deterrence at a time of profound change, Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Kahl, who spoke Friday, said the defense strategy fully supports the National Security Strategy and takes into account the range of threats the United States faces.
China is the pacing threat for the United States — the one threat U.S. planners must measure their decisions against. But that doesn’t mean the Indo-Pacific nation is the only threat.
The geopolitical landscape is fundamentally changing, Kahl said. “You have a rapidly rising China; you have a more aggressive Russia; you have persistent threats from Iran, North Korea and violent extremist groups,” he said. “But you also have a technological revolution, which is informing all of those trends, and a set of transboundary challenges, climate change, pandemics and others, which are generating real international security challenges, and also real demands on the Department of Defense.”
Kahl said the National Defense Strategy grapples with this complicated world.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has always emphasized the fact that China is the only country with the intention to reorder the political landscape and overturn the rules-based system that has served the world in the years since World War II.
Kahl said China seeks to challenge the United States, militarily, economically, diplomatically and technologically.
But the fact that the United States must keep apace with China doesn’t mean the department ignores other threats, he said. The strategy notes “the most acute challenge at the moment is obviously Russia,” Kahl said. “That word ‘acute’ is very intentional because it means both immediate and sharp.”
Kahl said Russia does not possess the capabilities to remake the world the way that China could, he said. But Russia “does have the capability to blow up the world,” he said. “And Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be reckless and capable of profound miscalculation and is directly threatening the security order in Europe and beyond through his aggression toward Ukraine.”
North Korea and Iran remain lesser threats, and the threat from international terrorist groups can flare up at any time, he said.
Kahl said these threats are the reason that “integrated deterrence” is a concept applicable across the range.
“Integrated deterrence and what that means … is a way to remind ourselves that deterrence activities have to be integrated in various ways,” Kahl said. Deterrence must be integrated in the domains of land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. It must be integrated with allies and partners. Deterrence must be integrated within the U.S. government, he said.
“We also need to make sure that we’re integrated across the tools of the U.S. government,” he said. “The U.S. military needs to remain the most potent military in the world — and it will — but we have other potent tools in our toolkit to include U.S. dominance of the global financial system and our unmatched political power.”
Kahl said another core concept in the National Defense Strategy is resilience. “The reason resilience is important is that our adversaries have gone to school on the American way of war,” he said. “They understand the American reliance on various networks in cyber and space in the informational domain, and they have spent hundreds of bns of dollars to try to hold those networks at risk.”
These networks are too vast to defend every point, “so, you have to make sure your networks are resilient so that you can fight through the inevitable disruptions that your adversaries plan for you,” he said.
Some critics say that integrated deterrence is a means to pass along missions to other agencies or countries. “Integrated deterrence is not an argument for our interagency partners doing more or our allies and partners doing more so we can do less,” he said. “It’s an argument that we need to do more, and others need to do more alongside us. And as we all do more together, we have to integrate those efforts together. And I would hope that that would be relatively non-controversial.” (Source: US DoD)
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