Commercial Solutions Opening
The DoD works tirelessly to achieve rapid acquisition objectives and narrow the strategic and defense capabilities gap between the United States and near-peer adversaries. A quick review of past newspaper headlines reveals the significant disparity in capability between DoD’s industrial base and those of U.S. adversaries. For example, China’s defense industrial base seems to have a much faster and more streamlined path for developing and fielding new weapons (Tirpak, 2023). Additionally, many of the most sought-after contractors in the DoD are not interested in pursuing DoD contracts, but instead are “finding much more lucrative and favorable markets in places like China and Russia” (National Contract Management Association [NCMA], 2019, p. 5). Thus, the DoD recognizes the need to shorten the time from proposal to contract award and make the process “faster, more agile and responsive to the pace of change” (NCMA, 2019). Recent notable examples of this acquisition reform include the Middle Tier of Acquisition (MTA) Pathway for Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Fielding authorized by Section 804 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2016 (NDAA, 2015), awareness of Other Transaction (OT) Authority, and the adoption of industry standards in acquisition. Even with these reforms, the DoD acquisition process remains slow, expensive, and bureaucratic. In 2021, and in furtherance of rapid acquisition objectives, the U.S. Congress codified Public Law 117-81, the NDAA for FY 2022 (NDAA, 2021). Section 803 of the Act provides permanent authority for a new type of rapid acquisition, the Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO). The CSO is a solicitation technique that is designed as an innovative means to solve the problem of slow government procurement. At its core, the CSO seeks to take a broadly identified objective, stated in a manner that allows for diverse solutions, and award a contract to meet those objectives within a matter of weeks, as opposed to the methods that now take months or even years using traditional models. A CSO can result in both Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)-based and non-FAR-based contracts and is used to acquire an innovative technology or an innovative means or method to accomplish the objective. As an example of a CSO, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakenhurst (MDL) accepted an innovation challenge from former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson and Air Force Chief of Staff GEN David L. Goldfein to “Think Big, Start Small, and Scale Fast” with its first-ever Joint Base MDL Pitch Day event. At this event, 10 small businesses pitched their
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Defense ARJ , Spring 2025, Vol. 32 No. 1
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