Acquisition is Hard, so Don't hide the Ball

"The Chart" as it was know was large, ugly, and unintelligable by mear mortals, but at least it was honest.

Honest may be an odd way to describe a mass of PowerPoint art with text so small that a 3'x4' wall chart needs to come with a magnifying glass, but yes. it's honest.

Anyone looking at the Chart can see clearly, at a passing glance that DoD acquisiiton is long, intricate, and often painful. There are so many whickets to hit, thresholds to cross, approvals to gain, and endless paperwork to generate.

But that's the truth isn't it?

This is the stark fact that all DAU graduates, those who have slogged the length and breadth of ACQ101 and 102 know all to well, and the wall into which so many VC-backed DefTech startups are running head long, and plenty of their backers complaining about it...

Why so much seemingly senseless tilting at proverbial windmills?

Because the prevailing narrative is that the "The Chat" is old school, all that "Major Capability Acquisition" mumbo jumbo is outdated like parachute pants.

We have this hot New Middle-Teir Acquisition, i mean look how much easier this is.

I mean look, even MCA look easy when it's just a little red tube!

See, there's a simple little Gannt chart, you start with requirements, and then one, two, skip a few you're at Milestone C!

Let's be real people, we've been acquiring the F35 for what, going on 30 years now, and it's not even fully deployed and its already in refit…

No no, that was the old way, we have cool new pathways like Other Transaction Authority now.

Sure, the Army started buying hololenses in 2018, and the FRIP isn't until the end of FY25…

I mean yeah, I guess the prototyping did take less than 5 years, as promised, but what do you expect for half a Billion dollars?

For hololens, the most dual-use of dual-use technologies, on the commercial market for years, with rugged versions on the shelf, produced by one of the largest companies in the world who has deep experience in selling to the government.

If that's how Microsoft fares, how is a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed VC-backed startup with no commercial traction, no revenue, and no experience selling to the government supposed to scale?

This is a large ocean to boil, there's a few ways to skin the cat.

Once way is to accelerate and compress the timeline of acquisition.

How do you compress the timelines of acquisiiton?

Digitize the workflows and use AI to generate the mounain of differnet documents required.

One way, is by using AcqBot.

The way NOT to do it is by hiding the ball on how deep and complex the process is. Sure, making a smaller and cleaner chart might make it seem like a smaller problem than it is, but did we fundamentally get rid of any of the processes or gates listed on "The Chart"? I don't think so.

We did muddy the waters a heck of a lot with 1,000 different "innovaiton" organizations and various bootstrap pots of money like RDER, Replicator, etc, and the overly positive narrative around SBIRs.

The facts on the ground are that the acquisition process is as long, painful, and possibly MORE confusing that it once was BECAUSE we obscured the complexity behind nice, clean charts.

At least in the old days we had halfway idea about the depth of the valley of death.