Among the changes that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out in his Nov. 7 address to industry is the idea that the Pentagon will be more willing to buy a system that provides “the 85% solution” now and the full solution later. On Tuesday, a panel of industry executives talked at a Defense One event about what that might take and what it might mean.
“It starts with how much acquisition risk are [they] willing to take to decrease operational risk,” said Steve Harris, vice president of defense and intelligence at the Professional Services Council, a GovCon trade association. “It is a culture change for the department writ large, and eventually, I think probably the government, in terms of what the tolerance is going to be for acquisition risk, and that’s going to be something that has to be a major culture change.”
Hegseth said the extra testing and development needed to get to the 100% solution was often “unachievable.”
In fact, it can add one to two years, said Margaret Boatner, vice president for national-security policy at the Aerospace Industries Association trade group.
“We have to be willing to make some of those performance tradeoffs to meet 85% of the requirement, and move out with more speed than waiting the additional two years to get to 100%, and then moving out,” she said.
Christian Gutierrez lives and works in that world of moving faster as a vice president at Shield AI, one of the handful of defense technology startups whose touted valuations exceed $1 billion. He oversees engineering for Hivemind, Shield AI’s flagship product for enabling unmanned aircraft to operate autonomously.
As Gutierrez put it, his world is all about providing customers with a minimum viable product—the most basic version of a new product with just enough features to be usable by early customers, who then provide feedback for future development and iteration.
He said companies like Shield AI always work to balance cost, schedule, budget and technical risks in product development and delivery.
“Really, what we’re talking about is a schedule risk. Speed is the name of the game right now. We have pacing threats, we have adversaries moving at speeds that we just haven’t seen before,” Gutierrez said. Now it’s a matter of how you incentivize speed, how you lower the barrier to entry, and we’re seeing that with this administration and the new policies.”
