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WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of Defense (DOD) has faced criticism for its slow and cumbersome acquisition system, which has hampered the timely delivery of advanced technologies to the warfighters. The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) held a hearing to discuss the use of defense innovation and acquisition reform to address longstanding challenges in the DOD’s procurement processes.

Members of the committee heard testimony from three witnesses: former Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development, and Acquisition James Geurts; Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Palantir Technologies Shyam Sankar; and Chief Executive Officer of Divergent Technologies Nathan Diller.

U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND), co-chair of the Senate Defense Modernization Caucus, highlighted the need for implementing the right technology and acquisition reforms to move at the speed of China and other adversaries.

Cramer said when he first joined SASC, DOD was considering bids for a cloud computing contract known as Jedi. In early 2019, the department selected Microsoft and Amazon to compete for the contract, which was ultimately awarded to Microsoft. Unfortunately, but predictably this led to an immediate protest. This back and forth resulted in a delayed award for a critically important product DOD needed.

“Five years later, we finally have multiple companies doing cloud computing,” said Cramer. “I was very frustrated by the ability of a company who didn't win the contract, […] to protest the company who did and then hold up modernization by five years. […] But then we fast forward to today, where we read about now what I believe to be the most innovative agency within the DOD, the Space Development Agency, which has been under attack since the day we stood it up by swamp creatures, legacy space operators, and legacy acquisition and procurement officials, and a protest that I almost guarantee will slow [down] the proliferated warfighter space architecture, which is the worst thing that could happen.”

Cramer asked the witnesses for their comments or opinions about the protest regime and whether more can be done. He explained while competition requires the ability to challenge, “it shouldn't provide the opportunity to make the country less safe.”

Geurts agreed with Cramer and emphasized the need for an avenue, though it has been abused over time.

"One thing I suggested early on was you get one bite at the apple,” said Geurts. “You could protest to the [Government Accountability Office] or Court of Federal Claims. You couldn't protest twice. I also think there should be some look at behavior over time and some disincentive for what I would call chronic protesting, particularly by incumbents.”

Sankar agreed with the notion the avenue had been abused. He said one way they could buy this down is by “doing more bake-offs, more things in parallel, getting more things fielded, because anyone can win a fiction writing contest, you know, it has no correlation to your ability to perform, but when we have the satellites in space, we'll be able to tell one way or another.”

Diller emphasized the need to build trust:

“When we look at these protests, if we take this approach, our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff uses this phrase, ‘acquire to require.’ It's exactly what Shyam was saying. How do we slowly build trust? Because at the core, it's a trust issue. If we actually work together at the beginning in ways that [Other Transactions] allow us to, trust can be built.”