WASHINGTON — The Army is set to release a new software directive in the “coming weeks” to bring more flexibility to acquisition and “streamline the application of modern software,” according to the service’s undersecretary, Michael Obadal.
“For years we’ve been trapped by the color of money,” he said at the AFCEA Army IT Day today, referring to how funds are earmarked for spending in the Pentagon budget. “We try to buy modern, agile software with rigid funding authorities, and predictably … it doesn’t work.”
As part of the new directive, Obadal said he cancelled the “rigid” existing policy and the Army is “pursuing the ability” to replace it with a policy dubbed Budget Activity 08, which “realigns funding from various appropriations to a new software and digital technology budget activity.”
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Such a change in funding mechanisms will ensure the Army is “maximizing flexibility” for its operations and maintenance, procurement, and research, development, testing and evaluation buckets of money, Obadal said. Flexible funding leads to faster software delivery which in turn results in more effective warfighting, he added.
“Hardware allows our soldiers to fight battles, but wars will increasingly be won by augmenting our people with data and software, more specifically, the speed that results in lethality and survivability,” Obadal said.
“Tanks, aircraft, artillery and satellites still matter. They always will, but the decisive advantage in modern conflict does not come from having more platforms. It comes from infusing our hardware with the right software and enabling formations to iterate their capabilities and act faster and smarter.”
Apart from flexible funding, the Army also plans to scrap compliance mandates for the Software Acquisition Pathway model and the establishment of a software response team, as the service has completed both tasks, Army Chief Information Officer Leo Garciga said at the AFCEA event today. But the new directive will include “fine-grained tuning” on low-code, no-code tools — ways of building applications that eliminate manual coding, designed to reduce the time it takes to build out such applications.
Further, the new directive will also be updated at least annually, Garciga said, calling it a “living document.”
“A lot of what you’re going to see is taking the stuff that’s kind of already now institutionalized out and thinking through those new things that need to be institutionalized and putting them in,” Garciga said. “We don’t want to do one document that lives forever and like 80 percent is done so who cares at that point. So how do you take this from shelfware to something that’s more operational.”
“That’ll be coming out soon, but there’s still some more work to be done,” he added.
