Living Within One’s Means: Revisiting Defense Acquisition and Affordability

October 4, 2021 Chris Bassler, Travis Sharp, Josh Chang

In Living within One’s Means, authors Christopher Bassler, Matthew McCarton, Travis Sharp, and Josh Chang analyze past vertical lift acquisition programs, current acquisition trends, and new acquisition methods in the digital age to apply all three to the FVL effort. Drawing upon these analyses and the results of a CSBA workshop (held under the Chatham House rule), the authors find that while past attempts to enhance affordability have been unsuccessful, new digital approaches, such as the Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA), may hold costs down while diversifying opportunities for new technologies and subsystem solutions. The authors also discuss the risks of deferring or cutting new helicopter designs, both in the face of adversaries and the technological limitations of current rotary-wing designs.

U.S. Naval Academy Midshipman 1st Class Bryson Ogden, center, explains a computer-aided drawing of the design of a standard hatch found on a Navy warship with fellow Midshipman 1st Class Nicholas Forys, left, and Midshipman 2nd Class Christophe Descour, Thursday, June 2021.

• The world is moving to digital engineering

• DoD Digital Engineering Strategy (2018)

• Digital engineering is being pushed further down into the supply chain as a requirement

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• Digital engineering enables stakeholders to solve problems in ground-breaking ways,

addressing long-standing challenges with linear design and stove-piped information & communications

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Summary

This paper analyzes the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the United States Space Force approaches to digital engineering implementation along with an investigation of the possibilities for a more coordinated approach between the two. The potential advantages of a coordinated approach are discussed. Five inquiry-based evaluation criteria have been developed for application to four different approaches that might be embraced by the two organizations. A qualitative comparison of the four approaches is presented in the form of an analysis matrix and description. While the assessment does not reveal a clearly optimal path, the process informs the value of a coordinated approach over independent approaches.

As a leading systems integration, sustainment and engineering company, our priority as a service organization is to ensure our customers have access to breakthrough technologies that solve their toughest problems. This includes capabilities that support the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) digital engineering vision of “an integrated digital approach that uses authoritative sources of systems’ data and models as a continuum across disciples

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to support lifecycle activities from concept through disposal.” We’re at the forefront of the digital transformation age, providing digital engineering solutions to service branches and agencies. Digital transformation and digital engineering are absolute necessities because of the efficiency and decision-informing value they bring to the table.

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There is No Spoon: The New Digital Acquisition Reality

This is indeed your last chance. Should you continue reading, your defense acquisition training — no matter what lifecycle facet, function, or operational domain — becomes a dream from which to wake up…to something new. Digital Engineering and Management, combined with Agile Software and Open Architecture, truly is the “rabbit hole” to escape traditional defense acquisition. I am excited to share more about this trinity of digital design technologies, why their digital Wonderland excites me, and how they foretell a faster, agiler, and more competitive weapons-buying process our nation needs to succeed long term.

Modern information systems and weapons platforms are driven by software. As such, the DoD is working to modernize its software practices to provide the agility to deliver resilient software at the speed of relevance. DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Designs are expected to provide clear guidance on how specific collections of technologies come together to form a secure and effective software factory.

The ability to deliver capability “at the speed of relevance” requires an innovative approach to providing secure access to cloud environments. As highlighted in a recent report by the Defense Innovation Board, “...the threats that the United States faces are changing at an ever-increasing pace, and the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) ability to adapt and respond is now determined by its ability to develop and deploy software to the field rapidly.” To effectively and efficiently achieve the objective, access to cloud environments must be flexible, ubiquitous, and at the same time, provide the requisite level of security and monitoring to protect from, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks. The purpose of a Cloud Native Access Point (CNAP) is to provide secure authorized access to DoD resources in a commercial cloud environment, leveraging zero trust architecture (ZTA), by authorized DoD users and endpoints from anywhere, at any time, from any device.

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The purpose of this CNAP Reference Design (RD) is to describe and define the set of capabilities, fundamental components, and data flows within a CNAP. It presents logical design patterns and derived reference implementations for deploying, connecting to, and operating a CNAP. It is a future state design to guide the development of next generation connectivity and cybersecurity capabilities to improve internet-based machine and user access into DoD cloud (in particular, commercial cloud-hosted) resources and services. A CNAP provides person entities (PE) (i.e., end users and privileged users) and non-person entities (NPE) access to cloud enclaves using a combination of cloud native and cloud ready security mechanisms. Further, a CNAP allows authorized outbound access to the internet, for example, to enable software repository synchronization of COTS patches or new versions of Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) projects and system-to-system interfaces with mission partners such as other Federal Departments.

The CNAP RD is intended for the Combatant Commanders, Military Departments, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), other Defense Agencies, and mission partners who require access to DoD resources in the commercial cloud and government cloud. It serves as DoD enterprise-level guidance for establishing secure internet ingress and egress to cloud-hosted development, test, and production environments.

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