Army needs to ask for ‘the right data’ along with right to repair, acquisition chief says
Ensuring the Army can repair weapon system parts on its own is a major element of its leadership’s agenda for acquisition reform. And asking for the right data from vendors will be critical to that effort, Brent Ingraham, the service’s new acquisition chief, told DefenseScoop.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll touched on the issue during a fiery speech at the AUSA conference this week.
“But these reforms aren’t just buying smarter. It’s also building smarter, and it’s repairing what we already have. Right now, our Army is a terrible customer. We sign away our right to repair. We pay unbelievable cost markups and can wait years for parts we could 3D print ourselves immediately. This may sound trivial, but simply being able to make or repair our own parts can save millions of dollars and save lives and ensure that million-dollar pieces of equipment … don’t sit idle waiting for parts,” he said.
Driscoll used helicopters as an example, saying the department sometimes spends many thousands of dollars to pay a vendor for items that could be produced by the Army faster and for a fraction of the price.
One solution, in the secretary’s mind, is to boost the service’s organic advanced manufacturing capabilities.
“For certain parts, soldiers will be able to download the schematics, manufacture it and install it all in the field. This is about more than money. This is an issue that is undermining our national security. It is imperative that we have a right to repair, and we need modular open architecture systems where repairs are as easy as printing a part or buying one off the shelf,” Driscoll said.
Ingraham, the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told DefenseScoop that locking down the right to repair, via the contracting process, is part of the department’s plan. But the service needs to take the right approach.
“Yeah, absolutely. But it’s the right data, right? So that’s where we’ve got to get very specific then, when it comes to, you know, what language goes in our contracts, sort of thing. It’s ensuring we ask for the right data. Typically, you know, in the past I’ve seen we asked for ‘we just want all your data’ … and it does make industry a little nervous [thinking] ‘I’m not going to give up all my IP, that’s what I make a living off of.’ And so typically it’s, you know, can we get those government purpose rights so we can reproduce those … in our own 3D printers? So a couple of things we’ve got to do there. We’ve got to ask for the right data. And it depends on the system, right? If I have an attritable drone that, you know, has cost me 500 bucks or a thousand bucks and, you know, in a year from now the tech is going to be outdated [and] I’m going to replace it with whatever the next new drone is, I probably don’t need the right to repair to that … because I’m not going to need to repair it — all of it — I’m just going to go buy the latest and greatest thing,” Ingraham said during an interview on the sidelines of the AUSA conference.
“Now, if I’m going to build a new Patriot system, that’s a different story. That will be around for a number of years. And so … it really depends on the kind of systems we’re going to go buy. So it’s not a one-size-fits-all,” he explained.
The right to have that access to data for the appropriate use cases, is absolutely something that the Army needs to ensure it has in its contracts, Ingraham told DefenseScoop.
A lot of that is available today, he added, noting that in many cases officials either “haven’t gone and asked for it” or it “shows up on a CLIN on a contract there somewhere, and we’ve got to go harvest it out and make sure the right people that need it, that user in the field, [that] maintenance depot has access to it.”
