AURORA, Colo.—The Department of the Air Force will establish around 27 “portfolio acquisition executives” with broad authority and responsibility spanning from requirements to sustainment and support, Secretary Troy E. Meink said in a keynote address to kick off AFA’s Warfare Symposium here Feb. 23.
Declaring it a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity to transform the acquisition process, Meink noted the work has already begun. He has already established the first five Air Force PAEs and the first two in the Space Force.
Meink said he aims to appoint 27 PAEs in total—nine for the Space Force and 18 for the Air Force.
The new PAEs will have authorities and reach based, as much as possible, on another new acquisition structure: Direct Reporting Program Managers. These two four-star positions have offices close to Meink, but report directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense: Gen. Michael Guetlein, who oversees Golden Dome, and Gen. Dale White, whose portfolio includes the Air Force’s biggest programs: the Sentinel ICBM, the F-47 fighter, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, and the B-21 bomber.
The difference between Program Acquisition Executives and today’s Program Executive Officers, or PEOs, is that PAEs will be more “holistic,” Meink said, in terms of what they control. Acknowledging critics’ questions about the difference, Meink said those critics are focusing on previous reform efforts that fizzled rather than giving the department credit for learning lessons from past successes.
“I sometimes look at the social media comments: ‘Same old, same old. We see this every seven to 10 years.’” Meink said. “But what I think people miss is that we actually do know how to do this. It’s not like there’s not proof out there where this works”: the Air Force and Space Force Rapid Capabilities Office, for example, the Space Development Agency—and even the National Reconnaissance Office, where he used to work.
“What we are doing now is taking the things that have worked from all of those models and putting them together into a single construct and delivering that and applying it across the entire department,” Meink said.
A key part of that construct is greater authority to shift money between programs in one’s portfolio, something the Air Force has already made headway on, Meink bragged.
“We’ve delegated about 85 percent of our contracting authority to the PAE’s chief of contracts. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, [but] that is a huge deal,” he said.
Those authorities are allow acquisition officers to be “much more flexible and adaptive” in tackling new or emerging needs and reprogramming funds, Meink explained, and he said he plans to ask Congress for additional authorities, as well. Beyond shifting money, Meink noted that he wants PAEs to have ownership of more “support functions,” to include everything from “airworthiness, personnel, Foreign Military Sales, security, facilities, and more.”
Those changes will ensure acquisition officials think beyond simply developing a capability and focus more on the long-term: the manning, construction, and other needs that would otherwise be handled by others.
“Right now, the PEOs, once they go into production, they hand over the sustainment and everything,” Meink said. “Now the PAEs are going to be more involved, not just in the development, but also in the sustainment part of the challenge. And I’ve seen that work very effectively, to where when you have to worry about sustainment, when you’re doing the development, you spend more time making sure that those things are sustainable. And we’ve seen areas where that was not done and the results weren’t great.”
The Space Force has already started down that road, combining acquisition and sustainment in its new Mission Deltas, and in his own address, Chief of Space Operations Gen. B. Chance Saltzman said his service is “toppling the silos that used to exist between acquisitions, test, and operations.”
Saltzman said the goal is “continuous incremental delivery”—fielding a good-enough system fast, having operators test it, and continuously improving it. The Space Development Agency is taking a similar approach with its “spiral development” model of fielding new satellites every two years.
Similarly, the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office made maintenance a key design consideration in developing the B-21 bomber, the result suggesting that the Raider could become a “daily flyer,” even though it has a stealth coating.
Meink said the department’s requirements process must also be overhauled. He confirmed his team is still working on a developing a new plan for the A 5/7 directorate. Under the Biden administration, the Air Force had envisioned a new Integrated Capabilities Command to centralize requirements development from across the service. But Meink nixed that plan and is working on what he called “A5/7 Next.” The idea is to put a Chief Modernization Officer in charge, a role the department first announced last fall.
Similarly, the Space Force will rely on its Space Warfighting Analysis Center to identify and prioritize its requirements, Meink added.
