Commentary: Workforce Challenges to Better Buying Power 3.0

Commentary: Workforce Challenges to Better Buying Power 3.0

Originally published in Defense News.

By Alex Haber & Raj Sharma

When Acquisition Undersecretary Frank Kendall released Better Buying Power 3.0 last month, he charged the roughly 150,000 DoD acquisition professionals with a mammoth responsibility: Preserve the American military’s “technological superiority.” To do so, they will have to create operational efficiencies and concrete innovations from 33 pages of text, written from the highest perch in the Pentagon.

BBP 3.0 positions the procurement workforce to succeed in this mission in many respects, but there are certain issues the initiative leaves open or fails to address, making the acquisition community’s task of putting the initiative in motion a challenging one.

Boosting the DoD’s in-house engineering capacity sits at the core of Kendall’s strategy. Kendall hits this point from both immediate and long-term positions. To give the acquisition corps a sudden jolt, he urges his foot soldiers to better exploit the many “physics-based tools, models, data and engineering facilities” available and necessary to shepherd defense systems through the acquisition lifecycle.

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Alex Haber is a business analyst in the national security practice at Censeo Consulting Group. Raj Sharma is the Censeo’s CEO and co-founder.