A new Army memo is overhauling how the service buys software, turning to private-sector expertise to deliver new tools to the force faster. 

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s policy update, dated July 22 but published last week, all but abandons the longstanding practice of purchasing products that are custom-built for military needs. Instead, the Army will rely on commercial companies to tweak their existing products for soldiers to use.

Driscoll’s directive follows Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to reform Pentagon acquisition to “deliver its weapons and business systems — including software — at speed and scale,” the memo said.

Under the new approach, the Army will seek software vendors under nontraditional methods the military has typically viewed as backup options if the usual contracting process doesn’t work. Regular acquisitions lay out a prescriptive list of requirements that a company’s bid must meet, vet the proposals over the course of months or years, and wait to deploy the finished product until all of its features are ready.

Instead, the Army plans to default to commercial solutions openings and other transaction authorities to bring in a broader range of bidders and receive a baseline product in a matter of months.

Greg Garcia, who served as the Army’s deputy chief information officer from 2018-2021, told Federal News Network on Thursday the change is a bold step toward more proactive software deployment.

He’s a fan of CSOs, which start with a five-page concept paper that’s easier to digest than a typical proposal, and move on to discussions with a bidder to determine what they’re capable of. Then a company can show the military what it’s achieved in a demonstration or a longer pilot project.

The approach cuts the traditional solicitation process from more than a year down to days or weeks, said Garcia, now the chief technology officer of the federal IT contractor Inserso Corp.

“That’s exactly what we need,” he said. “This environment, it’s complex and the threat changes, and if you take a year to award something, you’re almost out of sync with where the requirements [have] evolved to.”

Program managers will consider commercial products first, then commercial products configured for the Army, Driscoll wrote. And when a software product could meet multiple needs across the force, the service should pursue enterprise contracts with that vendor.

“Custom development should be extremely rare and will be authorized only when no commercial solution can meet a significant portion of operational needs,” Driscoll said.

He also directs the Army’s test enterprise to automate its work, accept testing data from vendors and vet products as they are developed to “enable, not impede, rapid delivery.” Cybersecurity officials, too, are told to ease the adoption of new software across organizations through continuous authorities to operate and reciprocity agreements.

Those can shrink the time it takes to get a product online, but raise questions about how the Army will ensure a product is safe across a range of missions — especially one that’s updated often.

“You’re going to have to rethink how we assert the cyber health and the continuous assessment of those commercial products in a way that’s a little different than what we do today,” Garcia noted. “You’ve got to just balance mission and risk and make that determination.”

The July 22 memo is among a slew of initiatives designed to bring defense software procurement into the 21st century. As military equipment grows increasingly digital, the services have struggled to quickly update their tech in response to emerging threats. 

The directive can succeed where others have lagged, Garcia said, if the Army properly educates contracting officers and program managers on the benefits of CSOs and OTAs.

“The biggest challenge is, when you have innovation in ideas, you have to prepare the people that have to do that,” he said. “The first person that tries to do a CSO is going to have struggles, but the second person that says, ‘Wow, that’s seeming pretty good. Let me try that too,’ and then the third, and the fourth — that will build the momentum of good, solid practice muscle memory to do this.”

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