DOD’s New Acquisition Plan Will Streamline How it Buys, Scales AI

The Pentagon’s newest acquisition plan is streamlining how the agency plans to buy artificial intelligence to scale it across the enterprise, DOD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Radha Plumb said last week.

Plumb likened the new plan, called the Open Data and Applications Government-owned Interoperable Repositories (Open DAGIR) initiative, to a “layer cake.”

“Let’s make a layer cake instead of a vertically integrated stack,” said Plumb in a conversation with Dcode Co-Founder and CEO Meagan Metzger. “Let’s figure out how we buy each of those pieces. … Let’s create some acquisition pathways, both on the prototype and challenge side, and if you’re successful, [it will show] what a scaled enterprise can look like. And then let’s do that in a predictable, repeatable way.”

A primary issue the plan addresses is the vertically integrated procurement problem DOD traditionally faces.

“Imagine if the way you bought apps on your phone was … I need my five apps … and you bought a phone that had those five apps. And every time you wanted a new app, you had to buy an entirely new phone. So, you bought a bunch of phones, and you had to make sure you use the right one when you wanted the right app,” she said. “It would be a totally unsustainable way to manage your life.”

Open DAGIR presents a modular system enabling procurement for different components to be integrated separately, she added. This ecosystem enables the department to adopt emerging technologies from the commercial sector more quickly and from non-traditional vendors.

Plus, with Open DAGIR, other transaction agreements can be a “secret weapon” for smaller non-traditional contractors, Plumb noted.

“What I can do for non-traditional companies, for new entrants and for companies that are really at the cutting edge of those technology solutions, is be really clear about the types of contracts we can get,” said Plumb. “You all can communicate that to your investors, to capital and use that to also help bridge the valley of death from the outside.”

Another aspect to the new model is that it enables the department to provide clarity about requirements and specific pathways to vendors.

“My ultimate goal is to get capability to the warfighter as quickly as we can,” said Plumb. “A key part of that is not just being clear on the pathways and requirements, but creating some transparency on that pathway, so that we can do kind of leverage the secret sauce of American investment.”

New Acquisition Pathways for AI

Plumb said that a traditional cost schedule performance is not adequate for bringing in AI solutions to the military. She cited new pathways like competitions, challenges, Tradewinds and the Open DAGIR that are putting more focus on mission outcomes, she said.

“The good thing about using different contracting approaches and acquisition management approaches, especially on this sort of software acquisition pathway, is we actually have a lot of flexibility in how we define what those key performance parameters are and how we want to drive what how we want to drive accountability for performers based on performance, not process,” said Plumb.

Moving forward, industry can submit regular feedback about Open DAGIR to further improve the ecosystem and procedures, Plumb said.

“The feedback has been great and extremely helpful for us to hear where we can solve things with [things like] more standardized contract language,” said Plumb. “That’s what we’re trying to do on some of the strategic C2 competition and guide challenges work, where we can do more on our side to create the right environment [for innovation].”

The agency is also still working to solve issues around data ownership and intellectual property, including clarifying data rights and ownership in government-industry collaborations.