Integrated Product Team (IPT) comprising early stakeholder involvement, including MAJCOMs, Air Staff, Develop- mental & Operational Test communities, Aircraft and Weapons Program Offices, and Operational Mission Planners. These organizations were chosen to help streamline the approval processes and accelerate development. Typically, these organizations are not integrated into a program at inception, but by doing so, these organizations brought very early feedback (prior to final design) and more rigor to testing in our experimentation campaign. The IPT also included all airworthiness approving authorities as part of the early development process to ensure the design would meet airworthiness requirements, thus streamlining and guaranteeing rapid approval without unwanted surprises. One example of the effectiveness of early stakeholder involvement is based on the initial Headquarter Air Force (HAF) instruction of an aircraft “ramp-mounted” weapon dispensing system. When this was initially shared with the appropriate airworthiness approving organizations, it was concluded that ground safety testing alone would take at least 12 months to achieve certification. Acting on this data, the IPT quickly pivoted and modified the design to be an “airdropped” deployable box, allowing the program to achieve its first 90-Day Sprint ahead of schedule. Had we followed a more traditional acquisition timeline, we would have found ourselves scrapping the effort and starting over. It has been estimated that the money wasted and time lost would have been over $25 million and 18 months, respectively. This would have certainly killed the campaign altogether. Fortunately, HAF sanctioned the change to their “requirements” after we proved this approach was severely restric- tive in capability and unobtainable over the given timeline. Their original requirements were not based on input from aircrew and SMEs. This reinforces the ideology that Higher Headquarters provides program vision and desired effects, and technical experts plan and execute the program. I built the campaign with a “test often/learn-fast” culture, dedicated to experimenting frequently and taking calculated risks. The sponsor requested a major test event every 90 days to maintain program momentum and Senior Leader interest. Successfully meeting this goal required multiple major tests: 20 separate flight tests within 24 months, including participation in three unplanned Major Command/Combat Command operational exercises over a three- month period and five full system-level tests in five months on three different aircraft (C-17A, EC-130J, and MC-130J). This frequent testing provided tangible results to Senior Leaders every 90 days, enabling them to make informed decisions and resulted in strong DoD-wide advocacy; this level of support continuously helped break down bureaucratic barriers. With “speed” came increased technical and programmatic risk. The campaign took an “investment strategy” style of risk management, accepting a higher risk tolerance early on, and lower risk tolerance later in the program. While technical risks increased later in the program, the level of mitigation increased commensurately, effectively lowering those risks through modeling and simulation as well as ground tests. Without leadership that championed speed in development, and expected and accepted temporary failures and greater risks, this program would not have been successful. An example of this is from the initial 90-Day Sprint, the team built a crude deployment box to identify technical barriers through experimentation and not long exhaustive trade studies/Analysis of Alternatives. The high risk (with limited risk mitigation opportunities) was obtaining sufficient decisional data from a rudimentary system, but this approach identified key technical challenges to make this concept practical. For $1.6 million and less than 90 days, the campaign defined all technical obstacles that had to be overcome and determined a path forward for a $36 million, 24-month effort that allowed us to maintain the extremely aggressive timeline. Maintaining “speed with discipline” required the development of a rigorous schedule and stakeholder accountability, which included: • Using Other Transactional Authority (OTA) contracts when possible (we executed a new $25 million OTA contract in less than 30 days), including contract “options” based on anticipated needs to support unscheduled Senior Leader demonstration requests and backup tests for higher risk areas. • Having authority/flexibility to eliminate stakeholders unable to work at the required pace. • No guarantee of follow-on funding unless the program successfully completed its “milestones every 90 days” (strong motivator for the contractors). • Identifying potential obstacles at weekly IPT meetings, where anticipated obstacles were met with deep-dive in- vestigations (often with modeling and simulation) to prevent them before becoming roadblocks and showstoppers. • Declaring a single successful test sufficient to progress to the next milestone, while PoR operational testing often requires numerous/repeated tests before declaring a task complete.
DEFENSE ACQUISITION | May-June 2025
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