The Department of Defense should consider accomplishing some steps in the acquisition process in parallel rather than in sequence in order to speed up supply procurement, U.S. Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as saying in DOD News.
Grady, a Wash100 inductee, made his remarks during an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
He recommended the agency’s Adaptive Acquisition Framework and Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve as two pathways to expedite the acquisition of capabilities needed by warfighters. AAF includes five decision routes that can be combined or tailored by decision authorities and program managers according to the capability to be purchased. RDER, meanwhile, is an initiative to encourage, expand and accelerate prototyping and experimentation among different DOD components.
Grady cited the testing phase as an ideal stage for parallel processing. “We can do and embed the testing apparatus in the acquisition process as we work our way along, such that when we’re ready at the very end, all we have to do is that final test, as opposed to then starting the whole testing process,” he suggested.
