3. Partisan Divide over Perceived Climate-Related Spending
As in other areas of DoD spending, authorizations and appropriations in past years hinted at lasting, bipartisan support for HED acquisition efforts to modernize the DoD’s ground fleet. Nevertheless, amidst industry’s near-daily advances in battery technology that make HED more technologically feasible and lethal in combat, Congress is scaling back support for such acquisitions. Recent congressional debate over NDAAs and appropriation bills, as well as lawmakers’ personal statements to media, reveal that efforts to electrify the DoD’s ground fleet now face similar levels of political polarization as other highly divisive issues before Congress. The primary reason for this divide is the perception that Executive Branch climate policy goals are driving the DoD’s HED modernization efforts.
“Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues[, especially] . . . in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change.” Congress is historically split along party lines over spending bills related to the environment, climate change mitigation, and renewable energy investment, with Democrats generally more supportive and Republicans less supportive of such measures. Therefore, not surprisingly, in 2021, Congress was largely split over supporting budget requests to implement President Biden’s EO 14057 (subsequently revoked by President Trump) to replace the federal government’s NTV fleet with newly procured ZEVs. In contrast, Congress demonstrated initial bipartisan support for the DoD’s RDT&E budget requests focused on electrifying its operational vehicles, approving over $100 million for such programs.
Despite initial funding for HED modernization, Congress reversed course in the FY 2024 NDAA and DoD Appropriations Act. Although it overwhelmingly approved the Army’s other budget requests for legacy TWV and GCV acquisitions, totaling more than $3 billion in RDT&E and Procurement funding, Congress cut nearly all of the Army’s $70 million RDT&E budget requests for HED programs. Pointing simply to “incomplete development goals,” these cuts largely defunded the Army’s R&D efforts into purpose-built HE light- and medium-duty TWVs and stalled crucial additional purchases of retrofit anti-idle TVEKs.
Closer inspection of the Army’s budget request accompanying the FY 2024 DoD Appropriations Act reveals the key difference between these two slashed RDT&E programs and those that Congress fully funded. In particular, Congress cut from the Army’s FMTV modernization program $25 million, the exact amount the Army specifically requested “to continue the development, test, and integration of Climate Change initiatives such as Tactical Vehicle Anti-Idle Retrofit Kit [(TVEK)], On Board Vehicle Power, Hybrid Propulsion, Predictive Logistics (PL) development and other technologies associated with combatting climate change for the Tactical Wheeled Vehicle fleet.” Likewise, Congress cut from the light tactical vehicle (LTV) modernization program over $43 million, the exact amount of program increase from the previous FY’s request, which the Army intended to “initiate design, development and testing for prototype HMMWV HEV solutions.” Demonstrating Congress’s aversion to climate-motivated DoD spending, the program’s description for this slashed amount stated that “HMMWV HEV funding supports the Army’s Climate Strategy . . . to modernize existing platforms by adding electrification technologies.” As these were the only RDT&E vehicle programs that leaders explicitly tied to the Army’s climate policy goals, the perceived nexus undoubtedly motivated Congress’s budget cuts. Confirming this finding, in the ultimate FY 2024 DoD Appropriations Act, Congress authorized RDT&E funding for the Army’s and other Services’ various HE propulsion R&D programs, including $30 million for the Air Force’s HE propulsion technology development, which budget requests did not tie to climate policy.
The statements of members of Congress in recent years, both in congressional sessions and interviews with media outlets, further reflect that their wariness to fund HED acquisitions relates more to the perceived climate nexus than any concerns about technical limitations or competing modernization priorities. The 2022 ACS elicited many such “split” responses, especially because it clearly tied the Army’s operational energy initiatives to Executive climate policy goals, setting the stage for more severe political polarization.
Demonstrating that misperception as to the DoD’s HED motivations exists on both sides of the aisle, Democrats generally supported the Army’s operational energy goals as “another important step” in responding to and mitigating the global effects of climate change, the “existential threat of our time.” In contrast, several Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate viewed initiatives in the 2022 ACS as “a waste of Department resources,” “a distraction at best” that jeopardizes the “combat readiness and training of soldiers and equipment,” and just another way for President Biden “to turn the Army into a climate change task force.” Senator James M. Inhofe (R-OK), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, perhaps best summarized his party’s response to the 2022 ACS: “This new proposal seems like another effort from the Biden administration to focus our military on everything except its primary mission: defending our country. . . . The Army’s top priority should be securing the capabilities needed to operate and win in contested environments, not adhering to arbitrary bureaucratic deadlines.” These arguments, suggesting that the Army’s warfighting mission justifies not supporting HED capabilities on the battlefield, indicates a fundamental misunderstanding—albeit a justified one in light of the DoD’s so-far unclear message—over the Army’s impetus for such HED innovation.
Along with these polarized media statements regarding the Army’s HE acquisition efforts, several House Republicans formally opposed such programs through proposed amendments to the FY 2024 NDAA. For example, one amendment sought to prohibit any DoD funding for RDT&E to be obligated or expended “for projects involving electric vehicles, electric vehicle charging, or photovoltaic technology.” Another amendment sought to prevent the DoD invoking the Defense Production Act to encourage production of EVs, EV batteries, EV charging infrastructure, or critical minerals used in EVs. Although the conference only accepted a handful of such limitations on the DoD’s electrification efforts, Congress’s subsequent markups of the FY 2024 DAA illustrate that political opposition to what appears as climate-related DoD spending will endure.
Despite this apparent nexus between an MDAP’s mention of climate policy and current congressional defunding of such programs, there are other reasonable explanations for Congress’s waning support for HE TWV acquisitions. Many lawmakers and DoD policymakers share valid concerns over EV batteries’ current technological limitations, safety risks, and supply chain vulnerabilities, preferring instead to hold off funding until industry makes greater advances. Further weakening political support for such acquisitions is the constant need for Congress and DoD policymakers to balance an already tight defense budget, especially in light of what they view—right or wrong—as greater modernization priorities for the DoD. Nevertheless, even if Congress and DoD leadership can navigate past these policy-based challenges to HE TWV acquisitions, these programs remain at risk of stalling due to the procedural challenges that historically plague the DoD’s acquisitions of tactical vehicles.
C. Procedural Roadblocks: Defense Acquisition Challenges to Hybrid-Electrifying the DoD’s TWV Fleet
Even if HED acquisition programs maneuver past the polarized political environment and competing DoD modernization priorities that currently block HE TWV acquisitions, there are persistent challenges in the DoD acquisitions processes that nevertheless will continue to hinder such innovation. Despite recent reforms, these processes still frequently result in poor performance outcomes for MWS acquisition programs, such as cost overruns, schedule delays, and design flaws, which are all symptoms of broader acquisition process deficiencies. However, before assessing how these MDAP shortfalls and more specific procedural inefficiencies continue to threaten HED acquisition programs, one must appreciate how the DIB’s current limitations could challenge acquisition leaders’ ability to leverage industry to effectively respond to the DoD’s requirements.
1. The Weak U.S. DIB: “You Go to War with the Industrial Base You Have, Not the Industrial Base You Want”
The capacity of the current U.S. DIB to support the DoD’s drive for timely HED innovation is anything but certain. Those who doubt the DIB’s ability to shift agilely and innovate rapidly will typically point to the fact that the DIB is still reeling from Congress’s massive defense budget cuts after the Cold War, making new MDAPs even more challenging. A basic understanding of the DIB illustrates how this decades-past drawdown still impacts the DoD’s ability to acquire innovative MWSs at a reasonable price, schedule, and quality.
In general, the economics concept of the DIB differs significantly from commercial markets in that most of the products and systems the DoD needs are unique. This means that “[d]efense companies[, both large and small,] build what governments want, but rarely any more or anything different,” and the DoD’s “orders have an unusual amount of sway over the shape of the companies fulfilling them. ‘The defense industry is [therefore] hypersensitive to and responsive to its customers.’”
This sensitivity of the DIB to the DoD’s needs played out dramatically after the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, removing the United States’ largest opponent at the time and obliging Congress to cut the defense budget nearly in half. After the Cold War ended, the United States required a defense industry “built for peacetime,” so Congress and DoD leaders reasonably opted for one that was smaller and more efficient over one that was adaptable but sprawling. In 1993, DoD officials brought together over twenty defense industry leaders to brief them on the DoD’s dramatic plunge in anticipated spending on MWS contracts for the foreseeable future, forcing those companies to either consolidate (i.e., merge) or perish. As a result, “[w]ithin a decade, the number of large prime contractors plummeted from 51 to five, creating the modern defense industry.”
Exacerbating the consolidation of prime defense contractors, in the early 2000s, DoD leaders favored an approach of building MWSs that were more advanced but less plentiful. This acquisition strategy ultimately forced additional consolidations of defense contractors into fewer potential bidders. It also led to unproductive MWS programs like those for the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship and the Army’s Future Combat System.
Experts believe the primary reason for such acquisition failures was the lack of competitive prime defense contractors who choose to bid for the DoD’s MWS contracts. An omnipresent problem in MWS contracts is that, although the price that companies could charge for systems is considerable, the volume for any single supplier is often not high enough for several companies to find competition worth the investment. For example, “[i]n 1998, five companies built surface ships and two made tracked combat vehicles. By 2020, those numbers had fallen to two and one respectively.” Additionally, the few defense contractors that survived increasingly began outsourcing and subcontracting more work than ever to other suppliers and built less in-house each year. This situation created a precarious footing for the DoD to be able to leverage industrial might at the right time to “surge” its capabilities when major conflict looms nearer. In addition, less competition meant that DoD acquisitions of new MWSs took longer, cost more, and were more susceptible to brittle supply chains.
The post-Cold War DIB consolidation continues to have a lasting impact on the DoD’s ability to surge acquisition and production of vital military materiel in future wars. The scarcity of prime defense contractors is evident in the low number of bidders for the DoD’s largest ground vehicle contracts in recent decades. For example, in 2022, only two companies responded to the Army’s RFP for a “follow-on” production contract for the JLTV family of vehicles (FoV) program that was worth up to $8.6 billion. Similarly, even for many of its recent vehicle prototype contracts, the Army typically only receives proposals from and awards contracts to four or fewer companies.
Despite this concerning footing, the swelling of the DoD’s budget in the wake of the 9/11 attacks demonstrated the ability for the DIB to move nimbly when properly resourced. For example, between 2007 and 2012, in response to the mounting numbers of Service member deaths from IEDs, especially in Iraq, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates led the DoD’s efforts in successfully petitioning Congress for funds to field almost 14,000 purpose-built MRAP vehicles—costing approximately $45 billion—within only three years of the DoD’s initial RFPs. Although the program was not without its critics, several studies credit these rapidly procured MRAPs “with saving thousands of lives, especially in Iraq, [where] they became the iconic vehicle of the post-9/11 wars.” Defense acquisition experts now look to the MRAP program as a roadmap for how DoD policymakers can effectively leverage the DIB to quickly adapt to new threats to U.S. ground forces. Even so, this example also highlights the extent to which the DoD heavily invested over the last two decades in MWS capabilities to defeat a counterinsurgency threat—for which the ability of the United States to produce enough materiel is generally taken for granted—rather than in capabilities necessary to defeat economic and militaristic peers, like Russia and the PRC.
Recent global threats highlighted the DIB’s uncertain ability to rapidly and responsively meet the MWS large-scale production needs of the DoD as it “quietly prepar[es] against the darkening security environment in the Indo-Pacific” to meet the “pacing challenge posed by China.” For example, the United States’ support of Ukraine and Israel in recent years—totaling nearly $50 billion worth of MWSs, equipment, and munitions provided to those militaries—has led to the U.S. DIB struggling to keep up production and the DoD floundering for supplemental funding from Congress to replenish domestic reserves of key materiel like Javelin missiles and 155mm artillery rounds. As the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force pronounced when discussing modernization challenges in early 2024, “[w]e are out of time [and] can no longer regard conflict as a distant possibility or a future problem that we might have to confront. The risk of conflict is here now and that risk will increase with time.”
Accompanying the mounting concerns over the DIB’s inability to respond to emerging global threats, the DIB must overcome several internal, systemic challenges before it can effectively support the United States’ strategic focus on GPC. A 2023 report by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) emphasized these increasing concerns, concluding that “U.S. national security policies and financial investments are not aligned to support the defense industrial base’s need to support great power competition.” Most significantly, the report found that the following “[k]ey industrial readiness indicators for great power competition are going in the wrong direction”: fewer people in the DIB workforce, fewer companies in the DIB, a shrinking financial commitment by the United States, less predictability in funding, and limited surge capability. In addition to these broad findings, the report’s survey of NDIA member companies, including all sizes and types of defense contractors, identified their most pressing issues to be “that the federal acquisition process is growing more—not less—cumbersome; the lack of budget stability is breaking companies and causing significant workforce uncertainty; and the challenges of finding and retaining talent are impacting even our most strategic defense programs.” To mitigate these challenges, DIB companies unequivocally propose that the two most important steps the DoD and Congress can take to strengthen the DIB are to streamline acquisition processes and increase defense budget stability. The NDIA report goes further, positing that a third necessary step is for government and private industry to cooperate in addressing these challenges, a strategy the DoD is also prioritizing to help galvanize the DIB to prepare for future armed conflict.
In late 2023, to support the 2022 NDS’s focus on GPC, the DoD published its first National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS). The NDIS’s “overarching goal is to make the [DIB] dynamic, responsive, state-of-the-art, resilient, and a deterrent to our adversaries.” To achieve this aim and to overcome the types of systemic challenges the NDIA report identified, “[t]he NDIS lays out four long-term priorities to serve as guiding beacons for industrial action and resource prioritization”: (1) resilient supply chains, (2) workforce readiness, (3) flexible acquisition, and (4) economic deterrence. Among these, the need to seek flexible acquisition strategies that “result in reduced development times, reduced costs, and increased scalability” is the most critical priority for achieving timely MWS innovation. Unsurprisingly, these are also the areas in which MDAPs most often fail and where the DoD’s HED acquisition programs must therefore avoid.
2. “Potholes” in the Road to Innovation: Persistent Shortfalls in MDAPs
Although recent improvements created more structure in the processes of defense acquisition systems, they failed in several respects to improve their performance outcomes, especially for the largest MDAPs. This Section first categorizes such persistent shortfalls into three main areas: program cost growth, schedule delays, and quality or design issues. Second, it explores how these three problem areas will hinder future HE TWVs acquisitions and why they are actually symptoms of broader, systemic issues in many MDAPs like lengthy procedural requirements, shortsighted contracting methods, and insufficient competition.
a. Three Common Performance Failures in MWS Acquisitions: Cost Overruns, Schedule Delays, and Design Shortfalls
There is no shortage of available research examining the shortfalls of defense acquisitions over recent decades. Whether by government agency or independent entity, relevant studies consistently show common deficiencies plaguing DoD’s acquisition of MWSs. These problem areas relate most significantly to MDAPs’ unexpectedly high costs (e.g., cost growth, escalation, and overrun), schedule delays, and performance or quality shortfalls (e.g., discovering design defects late in development, failing to meet requirements, and obsoleting technology).
Most commonly, MDAPs suffer from cost problems, especially cost escalation, growth, and overrun. The most severe of the three, cost overruns, occur when cost growth of a specific MDAP exceeds the amount Congress previously allocated through the respective DoD appropriation. Cost overruns frequently increase annual defense spending by billions of dollars yet “result in the production of the same number of, or in some cases fewer, weapons than originally planned.” An illustrative example of excessive cost growth is the Air Force’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program, “which “remains [the DoD’s] most expensive weapon system program [ever,] . . . estimated to cost over $1.7 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain.” The GAO estimates that unexpected upgrade and maintenance costs have already increased the program by more than $50 billion, which will only increase as the Air Force receives more deliveries of the problematic aircraft.
When an MDAP’s acquisition unit costs exceed certain thresholds, overruns amount to “Nunn-McCurdy breaches,” which DoD leaders must report to Congress under 10 U.S.C. § 2433. As several studies emphasize, “[t]he consequences of these cost overruns [and breaches] are substantial. When budgets are tight, excessive cost escalation or unplanned cost growth can lead to programs being considered for cancellation.” Among the Services, the Army has the highest rate of MDAP cancellations, accounting for 23 percent of all cancelled MDAPs. For example, two past Army “efforts to replace the M-2 Bradley—the Future Combat System (FCS) program and the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program—were cancelled [in 2009 and 2014, respectively,] for programmatic and cost-associated reasons.” Therefore, the Army’s HE TWV acquisition programs must strive to avoid similar cost issues.
The second most common MDAP shortfall is schedule delay, which plagued more than half of MWS acquisitions over the past decade. Even for programs that are sufficiently funded and on schedule, “the average expected time between program start and operational capability for MDAPs in [the DoD’s] portfolio is an estimated 11 years.” Therefore, any additional delay in a MWS’s delivery schedule likely guarantees warfighters will lack that capability in sudden conflict. Like excessive costs, excessive schedule delays place MDAPs at greater risk of funding reduction or cancellation. Therefore, HE TWV acquisition programs must proactively adopt strategies to avoid such delays.
The third most common MDAP failure is poor performance or design of the ultimate, delivered MWS. The F-35 program provides another illustrative example, remaining “mired in the development phase nearly 22 years after Lockheed Martin won the contract in 2001.” As the GAO first cautioned in 2005, the DoD began development of the F-35 “without adequate knowledge of its critical technologies or a solid design,” resulting in massive additional costs to retrofit and redesign key components of the aircraft. Every individual component that a program later adds to a MWS can increase the MDAP’s costs by dragging out the R&D process. This is particularly true for “speculative technology that has yet to be fully designed,” as Navy leaders learned during the acquisition of their latest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78). With its design including 23 new technologies, many of which were still being developed when construction began, efforts to finish developing and integrating those elements “increased the ship’s costs by nearly 30% and delayed the ship’s first deployment by four years.”
Even if DoD leaders adequately prioritize HED R&D programs and maneuver past congressional gridlock, these acquisition programs will likely continue to tread unsteady political ground. They will thus face even greater risk of funding reductions or cancellation than other MDAPs, especially those that DoD policymakers already prioritize higher, if they appear to suffer from these three common deficiencies. Therefore, before formulating possible acquisition and contracting strategies to best achieve HED innovation, one must examine the underlying causes for these failures to mitigate such risk in planning for future HED acquisition programs.
b. Systemic Issues Underlying MDAP Failures
After identifying the three main deficiencies in MDAPs, charting a path for HE TWV acquisition strategies requires examining the underlying shortfalls in the DoD’s processes that typically lead to those poor outcomes. These shortfalls generally fall within one of the three DoD acquisition processes of the JCIDs, PPBE, and DAS. In particular, poor MDAP outcomes commonly result from three root causes: (1) inadequate initial evaluation of needs and poor planning to integrate new capabilities, (2) inconsistent funding by DoD leaders and Congress, and (3) inflexible acquisition strategies and contracting methods.
Regarding the first and second issues, poor-performing MDAPs typically failed to deliberately assess the respective capability requirements prior to moving into prototyping and LRIP of the system. They also suffered from inconsistent prioritization in DoD budgets. For example, in 2004, the Army self-terminated the RAH-66 Comanche Scout/Attack helicopter acquisition program after 20 years and $6.9 billion spent developing and redesigning the aircraft, largely to shift the aviation budget to fight the Global War on Terror. Although the Army’s final termination decision demonstrated the value of ending an MDAP when leaders find that a capability need no longer exists, it also exposed the risks of investing heavily and inconsistently in an MDAP before leaders clearly understand the future capability requirements of warfighters.
Constant changes to an MDAP’s requirements throughout development phases creates uncertainty in industry, which already suffers from too few prime contractors to support the DoD’s need for innovation. For example, in 2014, the Army terminated its Ground Combat Vehicle program because it “relied on too many immature technologies, had too many performance requirements, and was required by Army leadership to have too many capabilities to make it affordable.” Much of the inconsistency in prioritization is inherent in the DoD’s need to constantly assess ever-emerging and evolving national security threats, but some unpredictability may simply relate to the frequency of turnover among DoD senior leaders that is inherent in the military.
Notwithstanding these needs- and funding-based pitfalls in MWS acquisitions, the most significant—and treatable—underlying cause for MDAP performance failures involves the use of short-term, inflexible acquisition strategies and contracting methods. In particular, those systemic issues include MDAPs’ ineffective use of OTs, expensive reliance on cost-plus contract types, inaccurate cost estimates, and failure to employ and enforce MOSA contracting.
Although DoD policymakers largely encourage the use of OTs to achieve rapid acquisition and innovation to fill critical capability gaps, MDAPs’ increasing reliance on these tools has led to a significant “decrease in the share of competed obligations, a key metric for efforts to maintain a competitive environment” in DoD acquisitions. In total, the more OTs in recent years meant that “[n]early 50 percent of obligations went to contracts awarded without competition, the highest share in the past two decades.” While the key benefit of OTs is their speed in R&D, their lack of competitive procedures typically results in lower quality goods, higher costs, and smaller chance of meaningful innovation by a DIB that is already “shrinking, not expanding and diversifying.” Such outcomes follow not simply from acquisition leaders’ choice to utilize OTs but from their decision to use them in inappropriate situations. The high costs of these types of short-term acquisition strategies add up and produce fewer useful outcomes, compounding larger cost issues from selecting poor contract types.
Regarding contract types and fee structure in MDAPs, the most significant causes of cost growth and overruns are the use of “cost-plus” contracts and inaccurate cost estimates. First, both cost-plus-award and cost-plus-incentive contracts most frequently lead to cost overruns in MDAPs. Although fixed-price contracts result in the lowest cost overruns, this is partly because programs that use fixed-price contracts generally involve more mature technologies and predictable costs. Second, “changes in cost estimates are responsible for around 40 percent of the accumulated cost overruns.” Therefore, the thoroughness of cost estimation, requirements evaluation, and market research at the start of programs are key factors of cost performance for MDAPs. Also an issue at the start of programs, the failure of MDAPs to use long-term contracting strategies like MOSA is likely the most significant contributor of MWS acquisition shortfalls for novel warfighting capabilities.
In many ways, the Air Force’s “absolute boondoggle” F-35 program provided DoD acquisition leaders with valuable lessons, not only for “how not to buy a fighter jet” but also more broadly for how best to avoid unproductive contracting strategies. In light of the F-35 program’s immense budget that still failed to reduce known risks, its lessons are even more crucial for MDAPs with smaller budgets and more compressed delivery schedules.
The primary reason for the F-35 program’s astronomical costs, schedule delays, and design issues was the failure of the Air Force to acquire the key IP rights for the system’s technical data and computer software from Lockheed Martin in its original 2001 development contract, a shortfall that led to a string of problems since. While not wanting to give up key IP is understandable from the contractor’s perspective, especially considering their huge investment and proprietary interest from development, it was an obvious lapse in long-term contract negotiation by the Air Force. As a result, the Air Force will continue to rely solely on the original contractor for expensive sustainment and maintenance of the aircraft as well as constant system upgrade needs. This shortfall has undoubtedly influenced Air Force and other Services’ acquisition policies in recent years to promote increasingly more aggressive, deliberate strategies to obtain key IP in future MWS initial development contracts.
In contrast to the Air Force’s F-35 program, the JPO-JLTV obtained the key technical data rights from Oshkosh in its original development contract for the JLTV, allowing the Army to award the FRP contract to AM General at optimized contract terms for a better product. Although this caused consternation and a bid protest from Oshkosh, and it is not certain yet if the change in vendor will produce schedule delays, it illustrates the need for programs to acquire such data rights to reduce costs and quality issues. Contracting for IP and data rights also better supports greater use of MOSA strategies, another problem area for poor-performing MDAPs.
Studies repeatedly show that the failure to plan for immature technology, unexpected complexity, or emerging needs is another significant contributor to MDAP performance shortfalls and Nunn-McCurdy breaches. For example, MDAPs like the F-35 program suffer immense cost overruns and schedule delays largely because they lack modular design and open systems to reduce such risks. The timelines of technology obsolescence and capability upgrades for most electronic components are very short. “[I]n a resource-constrained environment, the desire for cost-effective, long-lived” MWSs and the years-long defense acquisition processes conflict with these short timelines. Therefore, acquisition PMs must constantly balance between “maintaining design margins within system parameters” and “considering future periodic component upgrades to enable long service lives for systems by incorporating the latest technology.” Unfortunately, the bureaucratic and risk-averse nature of DoD acquisitions means that leaders often compromise the latter aim. Because planning for periodic technology refresh and update insertions can be costly and time-consuming in initial stages of an MDAP, acquisition leaders frequently instead opt for rigid design specifications. Such a contracting strategy is certainly more attractive to potential bidders, especially because it places them in a better negotiating position to obtain contractor-friendly data rights and/or limited data deliverables, thereby facilitating a competitive advantage for subsequent long-term sustainment and maintenance contracts throughout the system’s life cycle. However, as shown in the F-35 program, it also greatly increases the risk of future technology obsolescence, need for costly design upgrades, and expensive reliance on a single source for upgrades and maintenance.
The final underlying reason for poor outcomes of MDAPs like the F-35 program is that such systems frequently enter production phases too soon, requiring repeated design changes after production begins. The Secretary of the Air Force previously characterized this overlap between development and production phases, also called “concurrency,” as a form of “acquisition malpractice.” In the case of the F-35, Air Force acquisition leaders ordered the system into production before even its first test flight. Fortunately, the Air Force learned from its F-35 program shortfalls; for its new Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter jet program, it indicated an intent to obtain rights to the key technical data and software packages, incorporate modular design to a greater extent, and conduct significantly more R&D before entering production. This strategy aims to better facilitate the Air Force’s long-term ability to sustain, maintain, and upgrade the platform’s crucial components. Although the Army seeks to do the same in its HE TWV and GCV acquisition programs, two procedural inefficiencies continue to block the path of individual programs’ R&D efforts.
3. Procedural Inefficiencies Blocking the Army’s HED Innovation: OTs and the MPT in Practice
In addition to the broader systemic procedural issues threatening HED programs’ future success, various limitations at the ground level also hinder the Army’s R&D efforts. First, internal DoD and Army procedures have lengthened OTs’ processing times significantly beyond Congress’s intent for the rapid R&D, prototyping, and production instrument. Second, for entities like GVSC, the low $10,000 MPT for Simplified Acquisitions blocks many in-house R&D efforts to engineer key interface components of HED systems.
Regarding the first procedural inefficiency, Congress granted OTA “to give DoD the flexibility necessary to adopt and incorporate business practices that reflect commercial industry standards and best practices into its award instruments.” As part of this statutory purpose, OTs are meant to “[e]ncourage flexible, quicker, and cheaper project design and execution.” Nevertheless, while many assume that OTs will always be faster to use than traditional contractual instruments, in reality, the OT award process is sometimes just as long or longer than traditional procurement processes. Promisingly, the DoD recently proposed a significant rule change for OT-Prototype agreements, removing the “requirement that at least one third of the total cost of the prototype project is to be paid out of funds provided by sources other than the Federal Government.” Although such a change aims to drastically increase small business participation in OTs, these potential benefits remain overshadowed by the lengthy award process upon which many small businesses cannot afford to wait.
While some delays result simply from the complexity of a given agreement, the lengthier processing times for many OTs are largely due to agencies’ internal contract award procedures. For example, some DoD agencies that award an OT will still “conduct the source selection process as if it were subject to FAR Part 15,” making the OT award process just “as long as a procurement contract.” Similarly, agencies that require their OT awards proceed through the same approval chain as a procurement contract cause their OTs to take nearly as long. Relatedly, because OTs typically involve less money and lower statutorily required approval levels than procurement contracts, those at each step in the approval chain sometimes prioritize reviewing OT documents and awards lower than review of larger procurement contracts. Finally, “because all of the terms and conditions in an OT are negotiable,” the time spent drafting and negotiating these agreements between the contracting office and contractor also stretches out their processing times.
By injecting additional internal procedures into the OT award process, DoD agencies further complicate what Congress intended to be a streamlined award process. For the Army’s HED R&D efforts at the GVSC, this means that the award process takes, on average, seven to nine months to simply go from a defined specification to a signed agreement for a prototype electric motor. The DoD and Army’s increasing addition of unnecessary bureaucracy into OT award processes is likely both due to the acquisition workforce’s enduring inexperience and its general discomfort with OTs. In contrast to the DoD, industry can typically draft, negotiate, and process similar agreements in less than a month. In this way, the OSD’s expectations for OTs to mirror industry agreements “do not align with reality.” Worse still, the frequency and duration of Congress’s CRs each FY, combined with the inconsistent funding of the Army’s HED acquisition programs, mean that these self-imposed delays from the OT award processing can be fatal to those crucial agreements.
In part because of these delays in OT award processing timelines, the Services are conducting more internal R&D into HED innovation than ever before. Such in-house R&D requires agencies frequently must rely on the MPT and GCPC to quickly purchase supplies to engineer and develop modular components or key interfaces for vehicle hardware. However, agencies often face challenges in achieving timely innovation—like that achieved through the GVSC’s recent “Zeus” power inverter—because they are limited to only being able to use the GCPC for system purchases up to the $10,000 MPT. Agency leads agree that simply raising the MPT for these type of internal engineering purchases to $20,000 could have immense results for hardware innovation, which could then support greater use of licensing to industry and MOSA contracting. However, such a minor reform is just one of the broader potential solutions that DoD leaders must pursue to achieve timely HED modernization and best equip U.S. ground forces.
V. The Roadmap to Innovation: Novel Solutions to Overcome Political and Procedural Challenges to HE TWV Acquisitions
In light of the significant political and procedural challenges blocking effective and timely HED modernization, equipping U.S. ground forces with such crucial capabilities will require a concerted, two-prong approach that involves both immediate policy-based action and novel acquisition process-based solutions. To provide a useful roadmap to HED innovation, this Part presents promising solutions that will allow DoD acquisition leaders to bypass political gridlock and avoid procedural potholes that frequently threaten MDAPs’ success. Subpart A provides three crucial steps to maneuver past political polarization that currently blocks HE TWV acquisition program funding, including DoD leaders’ need to shift greater budgetary focus to HED acquisition programs, DoD policymakers’ need to detach Army climate goals from those programs, and Army leaders’ need to demonstrate the warfighting imperative for HED capabilities through effective, large-scale field exercises. Subpart B provides several recommendations involving novel acquisitions approaches and contracting strategies that are rarely seen in the realm of DoD MWS acquisitions.
A. Bypassing Political Gridlock to Sufficiently Prioritize HED Modernization
Prioritizing acquisition of HED capabilities for the DoD’s operational vehicles is crucial to U.S. ground forces’ success in future LSCOs, not because of the ancillary environmental benefits such vehicles might provide but because of the crucial warfighting advantages such capabilities already demonstrate. Therefore, ensuring that Congress sufficiently prioritizes HE TWV acquisitions through sufficient RDT&E and Procurement appropriations requires DoD leaders unequivocally communicate their ground forces’ and national security’s requirement for HED modernization.
As the DoD pursues various lines of effort for electrifying its ground vehicles, leaders can look to the lessons from the Army’s transition from horses to motors in the interwar years to develop a systematic approach to seeking modernization. That is, DoD and Army leaders should take a three-pronged approach to bypassing political gridlock over HE TWV acquisitions. The first prong involves the need for DoD leaders to focus greater RDT&E funding in budget requests to modernizing the operational ground fleet. The second prong involves the need for leaders in the DoD and Congress to change the vehicle acquisition conversation from one overly focused on climate policy to one singularly focused on fighting and winning the nation’s wars. The third prong involves conducting large-scale field exercises to both capture warfighters’ input and demonstrate loudly the enhanced lethality and survivability that HED provides ground forces in combat.
1. Reexamining Priorities: Placing Greater Budgetary Focus on Ground Vehicle Modernization Efforts
The DoD’s leaders and policymakers must better prioritize funding for HED R&D programs. The funding the DoD currently requests is relatively miniscule compared to the DoD’s massive shipbuilding and aircraft RDT&E budgets. While this thesis does not advocate for pulling funding from those modernization efforts—or any particular MDAPs—to fund HED acquisitions programs, it is worth noting the relative importance of HED modernization for the DoD’s ground vehicles.
First, the DoD’s hyper-focus on its other MWSs, at the expense of crucial modernization of its ground vehicles, ignores the enduring importance of TWVs and GCVs in warfare. Examining lessons learned from the Korean War, T. R. Fehrenbach noted the following:
Americans in 1950 rediscovered something that since Hiroshima they had forgotten: you may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men [and women] in the mud.
Similarly, despite the dramatic shifts that technological advances continue to bring to warfighting, such as UAS and AI technology, the “inexorable imperative” of warfare is not only to adapt to a changing world but also to remember the lessons from the past.
The recent focus away from ground vehicle modernization also ignores the massive force-multiplying benefits that vehicle electrification provides in the form of supporting other modernization priorities, like M-SHORAD and C-sUAS. The immediate speed and funding of HE TWV programs might not match the outcomes from the DoD’s hyper-prioritization of MRAP acquisitions in 2006. However, better focusing R&D funding toward HED innovation in ground vehicles will no doubt produce technological advances in propulsion and R&D cost-savings that will benefit other MWS modernization priorities.
Second, while reducing fuel demand is a significant operational and strategic imperative, the 2023 DoD OES’s focus on reducing fuel demand of ships and aircraft before ground vehicles fuel demand ignores the importance of gaining the other immediate warfighting benefits of HE ground vehicles. Additionally, acknowledging the difficulties of allocating limited financial resources among national security priorities, the policy ignores the “lower-hanging fruit” of ground vehicle HED innovation. As already demonstrated through the game-changing benefits of TVEKs and other prototype HE ground systems, these benefits are not only achievable much sooner than HE propulsion for the DoD’s larger MWSs but their R&D may also support those longer-term modernization programs.
Requesting greater funding for modernizing the DoD’s ground vehicles with HED capabilities is only half of the solution to overcome political challenges. To ensure long-term congressional support for HED budget requests amidst shifting political power, DoD leaders must also better “market” this vital capability requirement.
2. Changing the Conversation: Clarifying Misconceptions by Decoupling HED Acquisitions from Army Climate Policy
The perceived connection between the Army’s HED acquisition programs and its climate policy goals is not only counterproductive to ground force modernization, it is also inaccurate. In practice, the many expert Army acquisition personnel who are responsible for researching and developing HED capabilities look not to federal climate policy or GHG emission standards but to warfighters’ requirements to guide their vehicle design and acquisition strategies. In fact, across the Army’s various prototype contracts, draft PDs, and technical design specifications for HE operational vehicles, there is not a single requirement for specific GHG emission standards. Cementing this point, the GVSC’s engineers do not even evaluate GHG emissions of prototype HE TWVs in testing and demonstrations, except to the extent such data points are relevant to the vehicles’ visibility to enemy surveillance. In sum, despite political discord over the apparent climate nexus of Army HED acquisition efforts, which the DoD’s FY 2024 budget request only worsened, these HED programs have little to no connection to past Executive or Army climate goals. Therefore, Army acquisition leaders must immediately seek to clarify this misconception to secure consistent, sufficient RDT&E funding.
Army HE TWV acquisitions are not truly climate-focused initiatives, so they should constitute easier “sells” to secure funding from a polarized Congress. Still, Army acquisition leaders and policymakers can look to lessons from those who successfully advocate for inherently climate-focused initiatives. Professor Michael Vandenbergh is a leading scholar in methods of bypassing political gridlock over climate issues and served as the chief of staff of the Environmental Protection Agency during the federal government’s most dramatic shift toward renewable energy investment. He “eschews emotional pleas for protecting the planet, favoring a more pragmatic approach. . . [that] aims to bridge gaps between tree huggers and gas guzzlers by focusing on” common ground between seemingly opposed stakeholders. Taking from his sociological approach, DoD leaders should seek to bridge understanding gaps within Congress and American society by shifting their focus away from the assumed environmental benefits of HE TWVs and completely toward the tactical, operational, and strategic imperatives.
One obvious solution to clear up confusion over the Army’s motivations behind its HED acquisition efforts is to remove all reference of climate change initiatives from future program budget justifications. Likewise, in their communications accompanying such budget requests, DoD leaders should clearly emphasize that such programs are not climate-driven. Instead, they must focus solely on the persuasive data demonstrating the crucial lethality and survivability advantages of HE operational vehicles in combat. As perhaps the most convincing and unexpected spokesman for this need to “rebrand” efforts to hybrid-electrify the TWV fleet, Will Rogers, the Army’s former senior climate advisor, echoed this exact recommendation. Agreeing that DoD leaders should detach discussion of climate goals from their HED acquisition efforts, he recommended that “future documents and communications to Congress be more disciplined from a messaging standpoint [to show that] these efforts are purely in service of the mission and not to achieve climate aims.”
By concentrating on the warfighting capabilities that HED capabilities provide U.S. ground forces and on the strategic deterrent effect of such modernization, Army acquisition leaders can more accurately and effectively advocate for these requirements to DoD leaders and Congress. However, while prioritizing HED innovation and changing the conversation will allow DoD leaders to bypass political gridlock to secure RDT&E funding in the short-term, long-term support for energy modernization will require demonstrating the game-changing advantages of HED capabilities in the field.
3. Showing the Force: Demonstrating the Battlefield Lethality and Survivability Advantages of HE TWVs Through Joint Exercises
Developing HE TWVs will mean little without Army leaders quickly and clearly demonstrating their new capabilities to all relevant stakeholders. Taking a lesson from General Marshall in the interwar years, after receiving sufficient quantities of HE TWVs, DoD leaders should similarly coordinate large-scale field exercises to demonstrate down to subordinate leaders and up to Congress the critical advantages of such new HED capabilities. Similar exercises were crucial to building support for the Army’s transition from horses to motor vehicles before WWII and again with the Army’s implementation of the SFC in the 1980s. As early testing of HE anti-idle retrofit kits has already shown, such exercises will pay dividends in fostering ground forces’ trust in the new technology, especially in terms of its tactical and logistical benefits. They will also garner positive attention from the DoD senior leaders responsible for expressing requirements to Congress, which will prove vital to funding later transitions from LRIP to FRP of HE TWV and GCV acquisition programs.
Equally as important as developing confidence in the capabilities, large-scale field exercises will also be key to testing for design flaws and capturing input from warfighters to perfect the systems, thereby avoiding some of the F-35 program’s pitfalls in design and technology obsolescence. Nevertheless, being able to capitalize on continuous user feedback will also require early implementation of agile acquisition strategies and contracting methods, a path that has eluded many MDAPs.
