Small and medium businesses are still skeptical of defense work despite years of effort and a raft of legislation aimed at accelerating acquisition and breaking down barriers for new entrants—though that perception is slowly improving, according to a new industry survey.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done” to convince new entrants that defense work is worthwhile, said Keoki Jackson, senior vice president and general manager of MITRE’s national security sector, in an interview with Air & Space Forces Magazine. It’s the first time the federally funded researcher has polled the defense industry on acquisition.

In April, MITRE asked more than 1,000 acquisition professionals across government and industry a series of questions to gauge perceptions of the ease of working with the government and the barriers preventing innovation from reaching the end user, Jackson said.

The survey’s most surprising result, Jackson said, is the “difference in view between small and medium suppliers—or nontraditional suppliers—and everybody else.”

While more than 80 percent of large contractors, federal workers and other stakeholders think those barriers are disappearing, making acquisition faster and more effective, only one-third of small and medium businesses felt that way, Jackson said.

That difference in perception is its own barrier as well, making new entrants wary of entering the defense acquisition ecosystem, he said.

Over half of survey respondents cited “inflexibility and complexity” of acquisition as the biggest obstacle to joining the defense market. About one-third of respondents pointed to “cost-type” contracts, which don’t hold companies to a specific price for a product, and another one-third called “supply chain reliability” a top concern.

Jackson said cost-type contracts were mainly cited because they make accounting more complex. He argues fixing the system should begin with making it less complicated and better understood. “The acquisition system actually has quite a bit of flexibility in it, but people are unaware,” he said.  

Asked what would improve the speed, responsiveness, and efficiency of defense contracting, the top responses were:

Reducing bureaucracy (21 percent)
Adopting modern, digital technologies (20 percent)
Streamlining approval layers and simplifying procedures (16 percent)

Last year, a massive report from the bipartisan Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution rolled out 28 major recommendations of reforms to make defense acquisition quicker and more efficient. Jackson expects those suggestions, plus others that are still in the works on Capitol Hill and within the Trump administration, will have “real impacts.”

Those moves have to do with “simplification of the acquisition regulations . . . at the federal level,” he said. More detailed fixes, like holding people at lower levels accountable for a program’s progress, will be a big help, Jackson said.

Acquisition workers want artificial intelligence and automation to make them more effective and efficient, Jackson added, and to share data more easily through wider adoption of digital contracting.

These are “process and technology things that I think are absolutely in the realm of the possible,” Jackson said. “Then . . . the more you can take [away] approval layers and approval procedures.”

His favorite quote from the survey: “Get rid of all the endless, useless crap.”

In launching the survey now, MITRE sought to take advantage of Washington’s appetite for defense acquisition reform. Jackson pointed to legislation introduced last year by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) that would have streamlined parts of federal acquisition law; the bill expired in January and would need to be reintroduced for further consideration.

MITRE also wanted to see how well the “adaptive acquisition framework” that it helped develop for is faring, five years after it was implemented, Jackson said. The framework created six new “pathways” meant to streamline purchases in areas like services and software and boost the use of nontraditional acquisition authorities.

The adaptive framework is in the “toddler stage,” he said. “Even though it was enacted in 2020, because of the time lag in budget cycles, 2023 was actually the first year that you could start a program” using it.

But it’s grown in popularity. For instance, Jackson said, the number of software programs using the framework has jumped from about 50 to more than 80 in the past year. About 35 programs used middle-tier acquisition authorities for rapid prototyping in 2019, before the framework was enacted, he added. That’s grown to more than 100 programs.

He cautioned, though, that of the roughly $430 billion spent on defense contracts in 2023, less than $16 billion of that went through other transaction authorities.

“That gives you a sense of the room we have for increase,” he said.

Jackson said the comments collected through the survey showed improvement “has to do with culture and risk-taking,” and that less-experienced acquisition professionals are likely to act more conservatively than seasoned workers who are more comfortable thinking outside the box. When losing people to government downsizing, retirements and resignations, he said, “it’s going to be particularly important at this point in time to provide good examples, good tools to help people understand the risk trade-offs.”

Introducing new ways to streamline acquisition has helped ameliorate stakeholders’ most negative views over the past five years, the survey found.

On a scale of having a “very negative” view of the defense acquisition process to a “very positive” view, Jackson noted a dramatic drop in the lowest category.

“But here’s the hard part,” he said. “If you look at the bottom two categories — very negative, or somewhat negative — that only drops 9 percent, to 76 percent. So, yes, we’re making progress in the . . . most negative perceptions, but overall, we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”