Innovation + Acquisition = Transformation

Capabilities-Based Procurement: The Coast Guard Leads the Way

By ROBBIN F. LAIRD

Dr. Robbin F. Laird is senior adviser on international security policy for the Center for Security Strategies and Operations at Anteon Corporation, Fairfax, Va.

The Bush administration has focused from the beginning of its time in office upon the goal of military transformation. The innovative application of technology to develop revolutionary increases in military capability is a fundamental element in this transformation but, as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have explained, the process also requires the adoption of new organizational designs and intelligent risk taking.

Rumsfeld hopes to encourage a series of transformations that, taken together, will help to redefine how war is fought. Seeking to confront the uncertain national-security challenges of the 21st century, for example, the Department of Defense (DOD) has shifted its force-structure planning from a threat-based approach to a capabilities-based model.

The events of 9/11 and combat operations in Afghanistan have dramatically accelerated this effort and posed a new problem: how to fuse domestic and global national-security requirements into a seamless web of national-security policy.

At the core of Rumsfeld's vision of military transformation is the need for the armed forces to adopt performance- and capabilities-based procurement methodology in the design, development, and acquisition of platforms, weapons, and systems. Rather than each branch of the armed forces replacing aging assets on a one-for-one basis, it is necessary to identify the core competencies and capabilities that the nation requires in its national-security programs.

The Defense Acquisition Board and the Joint Requirements Oversight Council guide each service in this process and ensure that all systems will be interoperable in a joint-service environment, but Rumsfeld's top deputies argue that more fundamental change is needed in the way that DOD designs and procures its weapons and systems if transformation is to become a reality.

With its June contract award for the Integrated Deepwater System, the U.S. Coast Guard has demonstrated that it is in the forefront of the effort to follow a capabilities-based approach to military procurement. Although by law one of the U.S. armed services, the fact that the Coast Guard is, for the time being, a part of the Department of Transportation perhaps gave it greater flexibility in adopting a more innovative acquisition strategy.
Facing block obsolescence of its core maritime and air assets, the Coast Guard followed a "mission-based acquisition" approach based on an integrated "system-of-systems" concept. As Lt. Cdr. Michael Anderson, then communications director for the Coast Guard's Deepwater Project, said, "Rather than focusing on specific hardware, like a class of cutter or aircraft, the Coast Guard has developed a performance specification that describes the fundamental capabilities the service needs to perform all of its missions in the deepwater regions worldwide."

With its selection of the Lockheed Martin/Northrop Grumman team's Deepwater proposal, the Coast Guard and its new Integrated Coast Guard Systems partners in industry eventually will transform and/or replace the current force with fully integrated mission-designed assets complete with the life-cycle support systems needed. To do this the Coast Guard and its new joint-venture team will compare and evaluate various proposed platforms and technical solutions against mission requirements and needed capabilities. If fewer helicopters are required than fixed-wing aircraft, for example, or if more cutters are necessary than aviation assets--or if a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) might best serve a given task--there will be an opportunity to weigh the various merits of such choices.

Since 11 September, the Coast Guard's role in the defense of the U.S. homeland, and in the overall national-security infrastructure, has been vividly demonstrated and more widely appreciated than ever before--by Bush administration officials and the public alike.

The president's proposed creation of a new Department of Homeland Security further validates the national need for the IDS program.
Because the system is network-centric, not platform-based, IDS is built primarily around much-needed upgrades to C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems, followed by the progressive modernization of air and sea platforms. As a result, the already heavily tasked multimission Coast Guard will gradually possess the greatly improved interagency
capabilities needed to counter maritime threats to U.S. national security at home and abroad.

In short, although the Coast Guard's acquisition approach for IDS was forged well before 11 September and the emergence of any real national debate about the critical relationship between U.S. domestic and international security, the service has provided an especially valuable model that the Department of Defense might well follow to achieve its transformation goals for tomorrow's military. *