William LaPlante, under secretary for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense, said DOD is pushing to get the Standard Missile-6, Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and other munitions and weapons systems on multiyear contracts, which he said would play an important role in an extended conflict in the Indo-Pacific region, Defense News reported Tuesday.
“If you look at the real challenges, it is matching a consumption rate that you are trying to predict. War breaks out and the consumption rate of X goes up from here this quickly. So how do you … without a buffer … match consumption rate with production rate,” LaPlante, a two-time Wash100 awardee, said Tuesday at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington, D.C.
“We want to do the multi-years because — it’s not a panacea, it will get savings but that’s not the reason we’re pushing it — but it’s because it takes one more reason away from industry to say, ‘I’m not putting my [capital expenditures] against it because I don’t believe you guys,'” he noted at the event.
The defense acquisition chief added that multiyear contracts could help the U.S. government demonstrate that it is serious about purchasing more munitions for an extended period of time.
“I like to think a multi-year would help. Once we put up [economic order quantity funding], which is a bunch of the money up front so they [can buy] a lot of the long-lead items, we generally don’t break multiyear contracts in the DoD; we honor them,” LaPlante said. “That’s the reason why we want to get to that.”
