PARIS \u2013 The U.S. Air Force has a long list of acquisition programs that will be starting shortly, and defense watchers are wondering how the service will be able to juggle a mass of competing requirements. Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force\u2019s top uniformed acquisition officer, spoke to Defense News at the Paris Air Show about the service\u2019s ability to keep programs on track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For fiscal 2018, the Air Force made a larger investment in R&D, but kept procurement stable. Will we see an uptick for procurement next year?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
What we\u2019re trying to do is get the technology as mature as possible so that when we do procurement, we know what we\u2019ve got and we buy down that risk as early as possible. That\u2019s something we did and we talked about on the B-21 [bomber] \u2014 invest a lot of money up front to make sure the technology was mature before we brought it in and started a program. We\u2019re doing tech maturation and risk reduction on the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, the Long Range Standoff Weapon, a lot of those platforms to buy down as much risk as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are you concerned about protests for any of those programs? You\u2019ve talked about putting penalties on companies that bring forth an undue protest.<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
That would be something we\u2019d have to get congressional language. We\u2019ve talked about it, but it\u2019s not something I control. The companies operate within the rule set, and it\u2019s their right to protest. What we try to do is just make sure we\u2019re as prepared as we can be as we go into source selection. We clearly communicate with the contractors on what our evaluation criteria are going to be so it shouldn\u2019t be a pop quiz when we get into the proposal. They should know exactly what we\u2019re going to evaluate. And then I trust our teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So do I worry about it? No. Do I think there may be some? Yes. But that\u2019s the company\u2019s right. Our sustainment rate, or our rate of protests that have been sustained is pretty low, a little over 3 percent last year. Less than that in the years before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regarding the Compass Call recapitalization, why should L3 play a systems integrator role, and why should that company choose the airframe?<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our decision to go with L3 as a systems integrator is based on their years of experience working on the Compass Call aircraft and being facilitized to modify the aircraft. That\u2019s a key component. The other one is the material that they work on and the capabilities of that platform are highly classified, and not a thing we need to expand out to very many people. To be the most efficient and effective way to get that capability out in a very timely manner and that\u2019s the reason we went down that path. That doesn\u2019t mean that because they\u2019re the systems integrator that we\u2019re not going to be aware of what\u2019s going on. We\u2019ll get analysis of the information that was available, how they looked at all those things before an aircraft was selected, and we\u2019ll be involved. But we believe this is the best strategy.
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Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, the Air Force\u2019s top uniformed acquisition officer, spoke to Defense News at the Paris Air Show about the service\u2019s ability to keep programs on track.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":113705,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":25,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3384],"class_list":["post-52019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-top-100"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"K5F4WZXGZVHWJJPTHOD3GF553Y","arc_canonical_url":"\/top-100\/2017\/07\/24\/interview-lt-gen-arnold-bunch-on-juggling-air-force-buys\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n