The Air Force’s new Integrated Capabilities Office (ICO) aims to tear up the department’s playbook when it comes to buying, developing, and fielding new technologies, Tim Grayson, the ICO director, said July 31.
The ICO will press to replace the traditional acquisition process with a new “compressed” process which would issue contracts to industry on the basis of “attributes” rather than requirements, he said during event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Attributes “look like requirements,” but don’t set exact figures in stone, he said. “Instead, it’s ‘Here are the kinds of things I care about, here’s some targets for numbers against these characteristics.’ Now, I can use that to get industry on contract, and start doing detailed design studies.”
An attributes-based process made for better outcomes, Grayson said, because of the iterative discussions they allow. “Industry can say, ‘This attribute, this is really hard. Do you really mean this?’… And the operator might say, ‘It seemed like the right thing, I don’t care that much.’” But even where the operator reaffirms the need, “they can explain the nuance of why they care, and industry might have a different idea of how to satisfy that.”
Using attributes “allows that dialogue, and then once you converge on something, we can still codify that in a formal requirement,” Grayson said.
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall announced the ICO in February, one of a slew of changes designed to “re-optimize” the Air and Space Forces for great power competition with China and Russia.
The office was formally stood up in July.
The ICO is designed to accelerate work on Kendall’s Operational Imperative initiatives, which seek to break down organizational stovepipes in the Air Force’s technology acquisition, where commands have tended to advocate for their own capabilities, leaving the department as a whole to make difficult budgetary and programmatic tradeoffs.
An example is the Air Force’s Rapid Dragon program in which palletized munitions, specifically long-range JASSM stand-off cruise missiles, are released from cargo aircraft, crossing traditional lines between Air Mobility Command and Air Force Global Strike Command.
Attributes based acquisition was one of several big changes ICO would push and be part of, Grayson said. Another was ending the traditional separation between operators, the warfighters who will use technology, and to whose specifications it is supposed to be designed, and the developers, charged with buying and/or building new technology.
Making operators develop requirements and then pass them on to the developers, resulted in a “very procedural game of telephone,” where each participant whispers to the next and the end result is nothing like what it started out as.
Instead, ICO would work with “product teams,” staffed by operators from the newly formed U.S. Space Force Space Futures Command and U.S. Air Force Integrated Capabilities Command (ICC) like those developed ad hoc by the Operational Imperative initiative.
“Bringing operators and developers together, that’s been magical,” Grayson said.
ICO was at the forefront of a cultural revolution in the Air Force, Grayson said. “Some of the things we’re talking about, three years ago, we probably would have been either laughed or yelled out of the room, for being crazy,” he joked.
But it was a symptom of a serious problem. “From the capability and the technology side, we inherited, I would say, an unfortunate culture,” he said.
“A lot of developers have been so beaten to listen to the operator and follow requirements that people were kind of gun shy,” Grayson said. On the other hand, operators had two “failure modes,” one where they refused to engage at all: “Someone hasn’t shown me a new technology, I don’t have a field or program of record. Why should I think about operational concepts for something that doesn’t exist?”
The other failure was from a handful of operators who were “very, very creative and innovative, but didn’t necessarily have the grounding in the science and in the acquisition capabilities,” and as a result, set impossible goals.
That culture was “self-censoring, self-limiting.” Technology developers were risk-averse, budgetarily conservative, and overly concerned with box-checking compliance.
“We assume, Oh, there isn’t a requirement already. Or I haven’t done all the homework and have a full programmatic structure, … or this feels expensive, and I’m worried I might not be able to afford it or have to take it out of hide.
“We’ve got 101 reasons why we don’t let really great innovative ideas see the light of day,” he said.
The ICO was set up to be “that voice of modernization, the stakeholder that makes sure that new ideas get their day in court.”
That might sometimes provoke tension, as Kendall predicted: “Sometimes those new ideas might be at odds with something coming out of an ICC … that’s where the potential tension happens.”
Grayson pronounced himself optimistic about the progress being made.
“It’s been pretty exciting to see where we’ve gotten so far,” he said, explaining that the changes had created momentum, like a flywheel. “Now let’s do the hard work and figure out how. Even if we aren’t where we’d love to be, I’m very, very optimistic on where the flywheel takes us.”