Chem-Bio Office Cutting Acquisition Red Tape.

AuthorMagnuson, Stew
PositionNEWS BRIEFS

WILMINGTON, Del. -- The head of the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense wants little to do with today's acquisition regimes.

"We can't wait five, six, seven, eight years to develop stuff and then try to field it. We need to be at the pace of discovery," Douglas Bryce, said at the National Defense Industrial Association's CBRN Defense Conference and Exhibition.

As far as the so-called "acquisition bibles" and their processes, "Forget that stuff," he said. "Let's do what we're supposed to do for the folks that defend our country."

The JPO is charged with defending warfighters against an array of different threats. Protecting them against nuclear weapon fallout is different from a biological agent, and that is different from all the various chemical gasses that can be employed on a battlefield.

The gas used by President Bashar Assad's forces in Syria, for example, is different from that allegedly used by Russia against a former spy in England, he noted.

"Those are two very different agents and they react very differently. Yet they were designed to either kill people or at least put them down for a period of time," he said.

To keep pace with the threats, the JPO must forget about processes and worry more about the outcomes, he said. Too much time is spent following guidance on how to get things across the finish line. "That's how you spend eight or 10 years developing something.... We're trying to break through that process."

The DoD 5000 Defense Acquisition Guidebook "is a document that I read and I understand. That's it," Bryce said. But it mostly addresses acquisition category (ACAT) one programs: those that have large budgets. The JPO develops almost none of those, he noted.

Every couple of years, the office should be spinning out a next generation of technology.

"We must make sure we only do what we need to do to get it to the warfighter as quickly as...

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