The Middle Tier of Acquisition IS GROWING UP! by DAVID RIEL and SETH SHEPHERD
tinely be our default path,” and in- structing his staff in a later memo to “run with scissors.” Others took a more deliberate approach. The U.S. Army initiated eight MTA programs adopting a philosophy of using the Middle Tier of Acquisition-Rapid Pro- totyping to inform the requirement. By late summer 2018, pilot programs were off and running. Section 804 of the FY 2016 NDAA specifically states that “Programs that are subject to the guidance shall not be subject to the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System [JCIDS] Manual and Department of Defense Directive 5000.01” for requirements and simply calls for “approved requirements.”
Early in MTA implementation, de- fining what “approved requirements” meant was somewhat irrelevant as initial MTA programs converted from traditional acquisition, now Major Ca- pability Acquisition (MCA), to MTA— e.g., they already had approved JCIDS requirement documents. However, in that first year of implementation, as newly developing programs began to investigate using MTA, each Ser- vice’s requirements organizations determined procedures for “ap- proved requirements.” The U.S. Air Force/A5R (Plans and Integration) instituted the Rapid Prototyping Re- quirements Document and Rapid Fielding Requirements Document “if no validated JCIDS document exists.”
The U.S. Army Futures Command (AFC) established an Abbreviated Capabilities Development Docu- ment, signed by the AFC four-star commander, which “equates to an approved requirement.” The NDAA also didn’t define the role of certain functional organiza- tions, such as cost accounting and test. As time progressed, functional organizations either at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) or Service level wrote directive memo- randums adding guidelines. The DoD Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE), in his Aug. 30, 2018, memorandum, “Imple- mentation of Cost Data Reporting Re- quirements for MTA Programs,” wrote
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