LRSO to Be Part of Air Force Cost-Cutting Acquisition Initiative

Four months after a Pentagon official said the government was reconsidering whether to develop the replacement for the air-launched cruise missile (ALCM), the Air Force’s top official yesterday announced plans to move forward with acquisition of the Long-Range Standoff Weapon (LRSO) under a new initiative designed to cut costs while potentially slightly loosening capability requirements. Speaking at the Atlantic Council in Washington, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the LRSO will be one of four programs considered under the service’s “Cost Capability Analysis” (CCA) program, intended in part to enhance interaction with industry. “We believe that by gathering data from a range of sources, it should be possible…to identify instances where perhaps small changes in capability could have a very large impact on cost,” James said. “And this, in turn, if we would choose to exercise such an option, could mean that the Air Force could develop much more affordable weapon systems.” In October, Andrew Weber, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical & Biological Defense Programs, said the Obama Administration was considering whether it needed to replace the ALCM and the tradeoffs associated with the action.

 

CCA will compare planned programs’ performance metrics vis a vis cost estimates, specifically considering the cost impacts associated with slightly changed capability requirements. James cited a 500-mile-an-hour jet as a hypothetical example. “If we discover through this process that we could achieve significant cost saving by amending this requirement to 450 miles per hour, meaning trade off that little itty bitty capability, then perhaps we could use that knowledge to make tradeoffs in how we develop our RFP and our evaluation factors and maybe we might even choose to modify that requirement.”