DOD Official Lauds New Program to Streamline Acquisition Process

William A. LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, on Wednesday praised a new Defense Department pilot program designed to streamline DOD's process for procuring new military technology by making what has been a sequential process for onboarding new military capabilities more simultaneous.

During a panel discussion at an industry conference on emerging defense technologies in downtown Washington and in a recent opinion piece he authored on the topic, LaPlante explained how the Competitive Advantage Pathfinders program seeks to identify technology potentially useful to multiple military services that may be stuck somewhere in the acquisition process.

LaPlante labeled the three traditional, bureaucratic processes - determining requirements, determining funding and acquiring new technology - "the three-legged stool" or "iron triangle," and explained to conference attendees that CAP-derived solutions are arrived at by facilitating collaboration, removing barriers to the process and then validating and disseminating lessons learned throughout DOD.

"CAPs work by getting representatives - and buy in - from the resources, requirements and acquisition communities [the legs of the stool/triangle] together to address whatever might be the cause of the delay, be it funding, contract rules or interservice concurrence," he wrote in the op-ed.

"In all, CAPs can accelerate a specific technology or align requirements, budgeting and acquisition processes to deliver needed capability faster (speed) and, as importantly, into production at a high rate (scale)," LaPlante wrote.

During the panel, LaPlante also spoke about other priorities of his office, including protecting and sustaining the joint force and fostering a resilient, robust industrial base to meet the demands of protracted conflicts.

"At some point, you're having one industrial base fighting another industrial base [via] the warfighters," LaPlante said. "And I think we have to remember that an industrial base includes the sustainment piece, and that's a different way of thinking than we [were] thinking probably up until a few years ago."

LaPlante also used a portion of his remarks to praise those who dedicate their careers to defense acquisition.

"Acquisition, of course, is a profession and an expertise," he said. "And there are 187,000 acquisition professionals doing incredible work."