Despite getting a new name in the past few years, the current Major Capability Acquisition (MCA) pathway is a system whose time may have come and gone. Enshrined in the Adaptive Acquisition Framework in 2020, but long the traditional standard for how the Defense Department (DoD) procured platforms before then, MCA is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the threats we are facing. It is too slow to deliver capabilities to the warfighter and it doesn’t effectively mitigate production risk. Despite a desire for certainty, MCA central planning processes have led to programs being continually over-budget, behind schedule, and unfit for changing wartime requirements.

In peacetime, MCA pathway defects have been overlooked. With enough time and money, the system has been able to shepherd our largest and most expensive acquisition programs through development and into production, providing the US with most of its current weapons capabilities. Still, we have run out of time and money and no longer live in a world where our technological dominance is assured. We can no longer rely on a system that takes anywhere from nine to 26 years to acquire a capability and, despite its attempts to do the opposite, fails to lessen production risks for these programs. The MCA pathway, unfortunately, does both of these things.

The issue of time and its relation to the MCA pathway and the defense acquisition system writ large has been well-studied and oft discussed. Production risk, at least in its explicit relation to the MCA pathway, has not. The issue is that programs entering into the pathway’s Milestone C, or the point at which a program is ready to transition into production, rarely meet stipulated statutory and regulatory criteria to ensure that programs can actually be produced. These criteria examine manufacturing risks, the stability of production design, results of tests and evaluations done in development, and other factors. However, after a decade or so of development, the desire to start Low-Rate Initial Production (LRIP) and get capability into the field is so great that programs which don’t actually meet all of these criteria still pass through Milestone C. This results in inevitable schedule delays and cost overruns, but perhaps even worse, contractors forced to prematurely take LRIP fixed-price contracts have reaped enormous financial losses that have undermined the health of the industrial base.

Each year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) outlines this problem in its annual weapons systems assessments. Take, for example, the Navy’s Infrared Search and Track (IRST) system. Designed to detect and track objects in radar-denied or electronic warfare-heavy environments, the Block II version of this system passed Milestone C before all of its production quality issues were worked out. GAO noted that “between 20 and 30 percent of [IRST’s] manufactured components failed to meet performance specifications due to microelectronics issues.” These issues have caused the system’s operational testing to be pushed back and have subsequently led to a 33-month delay to its full-rate production decision date.

To mitigate these risks and shorten potential delays, weapons programs should be started and improved through a series of Middle Tier of Acquisition (MTA) rapid prototyping and rapid fielding efforts.  Designed to get capability into the field on expedited and bounded timeframes, the serial use of MTAs would reduce technical, development, and production risk before programs ever entered the MCA pathway. Such an approach has already yielded success. Both the Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower program and the Air Force’s F-15EX successfully transitioned out of the MTA rapid prototyping and rapid fielding paths, respectively, and into production under MCA.

In effect, the use of MTAs as a transition or alternative to MCA could eliminate both technical and production risk, and, most importantly in today’s environment, provide near-term operational capability to the warfighter. MTAs reduce risk by getting weapons and platforms out into the field and into troops’ hands for testing and small-scale use. Once their capabilities have been proven, these systems can then be scaled up through the use of either a rapid fielding MTA or in an upgraded, more truncated MCA pathway. LRIP under this concept could be considered as a production risk reduction phase still under development and be moved prior to what is now Milestone C. Only once a system is actually ready to be produced at scale should it be considered for any Milestone C decision that fully meets legal criteria.

Changing the defense acquisition system in this way would entail a rethink of how we develop and field weapons systems. It would require that we think less in terms of legacy process and more in terms of outcomes. Ultimately, it would get capability into the hands of the warfighter faster and produce a more flexible, efficient, and effective acquisition system with shorter timeframes and more realistic baselines.

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