The Streamlining Procurement for Effective Execution and Delivery, or SPEED Act, unveiled Monday, seeks several changes to improve how the department fields systems to troops in a faster manner with more relevant technologies.

While Congress has taken aim many times in the recent past to hasten the delivery of tech to military users, the SPEED Act is directly targeting the requirements process left of the procurement cycle.

“As we began to look at the structure of the requirements process, the length of time it takes to move from a warfighter saying that they have a capability gap and need a materiel solution to the time it actually makes over in the hands of the acquisition community, we can be from six to 10 years,” a senior congressional official told reporters Monday. “During the course of that time, the threat has changed, the technology has changed, the political leadership in the nation has changed, and the budget priorities have changed. One of the things that the chair and ranking member had us go do is try to expedite the requirements process.”

In order to shrink that timeline, the bill seeks to alter the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and create a Requirements, Acquisition and Programming Integration Directorate (RAPID). The proposal is to get the JROC out of oversight, renaming it the Joint Requirements Council, which currently serves as a “chokepoint instead of a catalyst,” a summary of the bill states.

If approved, the new JRC will no longer validate specific capability documents, but rather, will focus on assessing evolving threats and technologies to shape future force design and joint operational needs, especially those identified by combatant commanders who are directly in the fight and require urgent capabilities in the face of evolving threats.

“You’ll see some significant changes in the bill with respect to the role of the JROC, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and their current role in validating requirements, looking to move them more to an intake body, listening to the combat commanders, and then rapidly making requirements, alerting the need for a materiel solution, up into a new body that is designed to bring together all key stakeholders,” the senior congressional official said.

RAPID — which would be co-chaired by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office — would assess proposed solutions, evaluate costs, review experimentation results and make recommendations to the deputy secretary of defense much earlier in the requirements process.

The goal behind RAPID is to make an assessment of technologies once they come in and prioritize them to move forward much faster.

“Collectively, these reforms will streamline the requirements process and focus it on addressing capability gaps and urgent needs, rather than prescribing fixed solutions and generating volumes of paperwork. As a result, PEOs and program managers will be unbound from overly prescriptive—and in many cases non-essential—requirements that are all but set in stone once validated by the JROC,” a summary of the bill states. “Instead, PEOs and program managers will be able to iterate quickly and make informed tradeoffs. Moreover, these reforms accelerate the new requirements process to between 90 and 150 days, which is more than five times faster than the current process.”

The legislation overall outlines five pillars for reform:

-Aligning acquisition to warfighter priorities and operational outcomes.

-Accelerating the requirements process.

-Striking the right balance between regulation and efficiency.

-Strengthening the defense industrial base and leveraging commercial innovation.

-Developing a mission-oriented defense acquisition workforce.

In many instances, the bill doesn’t always provide new authorities, but rather, codifies certain practices and provides top cover.

“With our legislation, there’s not a lot of new authority that the department needs. The problem is that they’ve not been using the authorities that they have, because the system has become one that exists to serve itself and it’s very risk averse. You’ve got really good people trying to do really good work, but they’re in a broken system,” the senior congressional official said. “Where it may be just that the department needs the Congress to say, ‘Go do,’ then that’s — that’s another question to be asked.”

The committee wants to be able to fully empower PEOs and program managers to make the necessary decisions.

“One important area where we said we’ve got to fix is having senior acquisition leaders actually have the responsibility to go and make the changes they need. There are many areas where even a two-star PEO may not be fully empowered to make all the decisions he or she may need to make to get something fielded correctly and fast,” another senior congressional official told reporters. “We took a stab at that, and I think we created a new process where the people that should be empowered to make decisions have the actual roles and responsibilities and then can be held accountable.”

Leadership on the Senate Armed Services Committee released legislation in November, similarly aimed at improving innovation and reducing the time it takes to get warfighters new capabilities.

Both panels will have to agree on a final version of reform legislation before it can be enacted.

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“I think we’ve done a pretty good job of changing some of the incentive structures for our industry partner teammates. What we are now working through — and you’ll see quite a bit from the Department of the Navy on this in the next week — is changing the incentives for our acquisition teammates. We’re going to incentivize those contracting officers, those program officers, to go commercial,” Navy program manager Artem Sherbinin said Tuesday at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo.

Sherbinin previously served as an engineering officer, navigator, and air defense planner onboard guided missile cruisers and destroyers. He was also the inaugural chief technology officer at the Navy’s Task Force Hopper.

After the panel, he told DefenseScoop that, in the current environment, acquisition program managers are assessed based on “cost, schedule, and performance” — and “performance refers to meeting requirements documents.”

Those input metrics being so sharply focused on compliance at times can prevent the Navy’s purchasers from taking on risks that are often associated with existing and emerging technologies. 

“We want to shift to an output- and outcomes-based approach for measuring success. We are going to outline some of those metrics in an upcoming ‘Commercial Acquisitions First’ memo, as well as subsequent trainings for the acquisitions workforce,” Sherbinin told DefenseScoop.

This new plan for procurement incentives is set to drop at a time when Navy officials are pursuing a large-scale modernization effort that prioritizes the optimization of strategic capability investments, and aligns with the Trump administration’s vision to position the government to operate in a more efficient manner.

At the AI+ Expo, Sherbinin also said the forthcoming acquisition incentives stem from two primary motivators: internal statistics and the pacing threat of China.

“We believe a conflict over Taiwan with China is likely inside of between 2027 and the early 2030s — we have publicly stated that, our service chief and our secretary of the Navy have reiterated that constantly. If we’re serious about that, the Navy is actually going to have 13 less warships between now and 2027, which means the only thing that’s going to come between now and then is new software. And so how we buy new software has to change, right? This is something that we’re going to buy off-the-shelf. It’s not something we’re going to create in a government lab,” he said. “And so we have to reincentivize how our acquisitions workforce thinks through procurement.”

He pointed to recent defense data that revealed the Navy accounts for the smallest percentage of new procuring capability from new entrants in the defense industrial base of any of the Pentagon’s departments. 

“We account for the smallest percentage of other transaction authority contracts, and so we’re looking to incentivize those numbers to go up,” Sherbinin said.

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Next year will mark the fourth iteration of the educational ICAP initiative, which DIU runs in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University. This fellowship is designed to provide DOD’s leading procurement professionals with hands-on experience and virtual training to help them more effectively buy in-demand commercial technologies from non-traditional military contractors. 

“We have other acquisition officers from across the department who can apply to the year-long fellowship with DIU — to learn our process, how we work with industry, and then bring that back to wherever they’re going. And [the next ICAP application] just opened today,” DIU’s Deputy Director for Commercial Operations Liz Young McNally told DefenseScoop during a panel at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo.

If tapped for the fellowship, personnel will get a chance to work on a variety of real-world, military service-aligned projects alongside a DIU contracting officer, project team and commercial solution providers.

The fellows will also gain in-depth instruction on a flexible contracting mechanism designed for rapid prototyping and acquisition of commercial tech, known as other transaction (OT) authority. That mechanism, as well as DIU’s commercial solutions opening (CSO) solicitation process, helps the Pentagon operate at a pace that is closer to commercial speeds, when buying certain technologies.

Pointing to recent internal DIU stats, McNally said that for roughly 40% of the companies that win a new CSO deal each year, “this is the first time they ever worked with the DOD.”

“We’ve built all of these processes [to accelerate acquisition]. So we’re asking for a problem statement as opposed to a requirement. It’s a short response, right — like a few pages or a few slides, as opposed to something more — very rapid. And [the ICAP fellowship] is one of the processes that we have built to help not just do it ourselves, but then scale it across the department,” she noted.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently issued new guidance to inform how the Pentagon buys software capabilities. In it, he directed Pentagon officials to prioritize OT and CSO procurement options when purchasing digital assets for the military.

“[DIU is] also working very closely with [the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment] and others in the department to implement the president’s new executive order on acquisition. And programs like that fellowship are a real way that we’re going to be able to help upskill, and train, and drive the culture change required so that we bring in more commercial technology,” McNally told DefenseScoop.

Those who wish to apply for ICAP must be permanent government civilians or active component military contracting officers. Each fellow will produce a capstone project that will serve as a training plan for their home organization, based on what they learn throughout the 12-month program.

Applications will be accepted until July 31. DIU aims to notify selected candidates in September and begin the program in October.

“To ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage, we need contracting professionals who are fluent in both the defense and commercial sectors, and who can help their teammates across the department to develop that same fluency. That is what the ICAP fellowship delivers, and we need to keep scaling it — and its impact — for the department’s critical needs,” DIU Director Doug Beck said in a statement.

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President Donald Trump officially nominated Duffey in January to lead the A&S directorate and be the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer.

During his confirmation process, Duffey told lawmakers that some of his top priorities, if confirmed, would be to help “rebuild” the military, rapidly accelerate delivery of capabilities and “repatriate” supply chains.

He also noted his desire to “modernize and streamline” the defense acquisition system, including by attracting more private capital investment and new entrants to the Pentagon’s acquisition ecosystem in order to “maximize competition, quality, and affordability in the defense industrial base,” according to his responses to advance policy questions from senators ahead of his confirmation hearing in March.

“In addition to creating and maintaining a workplace culture focused on performance and results, if confirmed I intend to drive implementation of key initiatives that will keep our acquisition and sustainment system at the cutting edge of 21st century management practices that drive performance, including implementation of ongoing initiatives such as capability portfolio management, the adaptive acquisition framework, modular open system architectures, other transaction authority contracting, and acquisition workforce development,” he wrote.

He also told lawmakers that he would review the Pentagon’s controversial Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 (CMMC 2.0) initiative, if confirmed.

Duffey has previous experience working in government, including at the Pentagon. He served as associate director of national security programs in the Office of Management and Budget during the first Trump administration. He’s also served as deputy chief of staff to the secretary of defense and chief of staff to the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, among other roles.

The new A&S chief will be expected to work closely with Emil Michael, a former Uber executive who’s now serving as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, to help bring next-generation capabilities into the U.S. military’s arsenal.

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The guidance directs the implementation of an executive order that President Donald Trump issued to federal agencies last month.

“It is the policy of my Administration that agencies shall procure commercially available products and services, including those that can be modified to fill agencies’ needs, to the maximum extent practicable,” Trump wrote in the EO, which called for pursuing “more cost-effective” solutions and services for taxpayers in federal contracting.

Pentagon officials “must redouble our efforts to establish requirements in a way that avoids inadvertently disqualifying commercial solutions,” John Tenaglia, DOD’s principal director for defense policy, contracting, and acquisition policy, wrote in the new memo to acquisition executives at the Departments of the Army, Navy and Air Force, Cyber Command, Special Operations Command, Transportation Command, and DOD agency and field activity directors. “Requiring activities, program managers, and contracting officers must work together to identify commercial solutions to fulfill DoD mission requirements.”

He warned against “casting truly non-commercial products or services as ‘commercial’ for the purpose of misapplying policies and procedures unique to the acquisition of commercial products and commercial services.”

Tenaglia emphasized the importance of continuous market research so that the DOD acquisition community can stay abreast of commercially available solutions.

The EO implementation guidance calls for high-level oversight of proposed procurements, noting that contracting officers don’t have the authority to independently determine whether a commercial product or service is sufficient to satisfy a requirement owner’s needs.

The authority to approve or deny proposed non-commercial procurements will rest with DOD components’ senior procurement executives unless they delegate that authority to a general officer, flag officer, or member of the Senior Executive Service within their respective agencies.

“Any delegation(s) shall only be granted to acquisition officials possessing the necessary acumen to determine whether a proposed non-commercial procurement serves the best interests of the agency,” an attachment to Tenaglia’s memo states.

In the near term, contracting officers will be tasked to conduct a review, no later than June 15, of pending Federal Acquisition Regulation actions — including all open solicitations, pre-solicitation notices, solicitation notices, award notices, and sole source notices — for prime contract awards for non-commercial products or services valued at or above the “Simplified Acquisition Threshold.” That threshold is currently $250,000, according to the Defense Acquisition University.

The reviews don’t have to include contracts that have already been awarded, according to the new implementation guidance.

“Contracting officers are to either consolidate or create an application for each solicitation, pre-solicitation notice, solicitation notice, award notice, and sole source notice into a proposed application requesting approval to proceed with a prime contract procurement for non-commercial products or services. Applications must be submitted to the respective approval authority,” the guidance states.

In the future, program managers and requirement owners will have to submit a request for approval to procure non-commercial products or services under FAR-based prime contracts prior to releasing solicitations valued at or above the Simplified Acquisition Threshold. As part of those efforts, officials must provide a justification for pursuing a “Government-unique, custom-developed or otherwise non-commercial product or service,” as well as a report on the market research that was used to determine the availability of commercial products and services to meet the Defense Department’s needs.

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“I think that the building is not quite prepared for what’s about to happen to it. That’s my observation in the first 30 days,” noted Colin Carroll, chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense, referring to the Pentagon.

Carroll, a former Marine Corps intelligence officer with deep AI expertise, participated on a panel with defense and industry officials at the House Defense Modernization Caucus’ official re-launch for this session of Congress.

At the event, HDMC’s co-founders Reps. Rob Wittman, R-Va., and Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., also spotlighted some of the caucus’ near-term initiatives — including growing its bipartisan membership and driving legislative changes to transform how DOD adopts modern software and tech-enabled warfighting assets.

“I think we have a huge opportunity in the new administration. I’m very optimistic that there’s broad, bipartisan and sort of non-partisan recognition of the urgencies here. And disruption can be good as long as we’re thoughtful about it, which I think we will be. And we want to be part of driving that and making sure that that’s aligned with you all,” Ryan, an Army combat veteran, told attendees.

Broadly, the lawmakers suggested that in parallel with their Senate colleagues, the one-year-old caucus is keen to pinpoint and ultimately eliminate what they view to be unnecessary bureaucratic layers and processes that are hindering the DOD acquisition system. 

They each emphasized the need for more innovative “flexible funding” mechanisms to accelerate the delivery of new and quickly-evolving capabilities to the military — especially at the operational level.

“I think the caucus is a critical component of what’s necessary to inform both the authorization and appropriations process. The good news is that the authorizers and appropriators are starting to see what is necessary for us to do,” Wittman said.

“We’ve seen in the past when we’ve had significant changes, it is because Congress has acted. And we have to be unafraid of making big changes. Being constructively disruptive, that’s our key,” he added.

Government and industry officials on a separate panel also highlighted existing policy and contracting complexities that could be hindering the military’s progress, suggesting a need for both immediate and more lengthy institutional reforms to modernize how the Pentagon does business.

Carroll hinted at some of the potential changes in the pipeline from DOD’s new and incoming leadership team.

“I think you’ll see the administration do some interesting things with a concept called the DRPM, the Direct Reporting Program Manager, which is a formal acquisition concept that the services typically run,” he said, pointing to the Navy’s Overmatch program as one example.

“I think you’ll see that applied to some weapons systems and business systems directly to either the deputy or [acquisition and sustainment directorate] going forward [to move more quickly]. But you can’t do that with every weapon system and program in the department. So, we have to fix the longer-term foundation as well,” he explained.

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The sea service plans to launch a new broad agency announcement next month — aptly named Catapult — via which it will invest millions of dollars in strategic financing to support small businesses with existing capabilities that can tackle the Navy’s highest-priority concerns, like digital architecture development and rearming at sea.

During a recent joint interview to preview the upcoming BAA, two senior Navy officials leading Catapult briefed DefenseScoop on its roots and their creative vision to get small businesses involved in traditionally sole-sourced environments to become more disruptive in meeting real-world needs.

“The success would be, we have gotten through the bureaucracy — catapulted over all of the bureaucracy of slow stuff that we’re used to — and we’ve taken a good idea from the small business community and we’ve demonstrated it and we’re transitioning it to the warfighter,” said Jacob Glassman, senior technical advisor to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

This first-of-its-kind, multi-award Catapult challenge will leverage Small Business Innovation Research funding for direct-to-phase-two prototypes already approved in the Navy or other federal agencies, and potentially expedite the transition of those proven capabilities to military personnel.

Catapult’s origins trace back to a study that Glassman’s colleague, Maria Proestou, kicked off for Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro a little over two years ago to look into the sea service’s R&D enterprise concept. 

“It’s kind of out of this study that had me take a look at that — that the original Catapult idea emerged and it was really very much about, how do we put strategic resources to take great ideas and get them better positioned to scale?” Proestou, who now serves as a strategic acquisition advisor within the Navy’s research, development and acquisition directorate, told DefenseScoop.

Building on the success of the earliest Catapult iteration that subsequently followed that, her and Glassman’s team is now planning to issue the pre-release of its “25.4 Catapult Challenge BAA” the first week of October, with aims to start accepting proposals Oct. 23. 

The opportunity will focus on contemporary “problems that we really want to get some targeted resources against,” Proestou explained.

Smaller-sized companies that have already been approved in any military or government SBIR program will be invited to participate — and potentially be placed on a path to deploy their technologies with specific Navy programs at an accelerated pace.

“We want to have the challenge be about getting these prototypes more mature such that we could demonstrate them and then make the case for scaling. That’s really important to the Catapult challenge is to get us to that point where we can really go straight to phase three and deploy it at scale,” Proestou said.

“And we’ve seen that work with other examples with small businesses and we know we can replicate it. And I use that word deliberately in my answer,” she added — loosely pointing to the Defense Department’s unfolding Replicator initiative.

Though they couldn’t provide many details about all the topics that will be covered in the BAA, the officials confirmed that one of the challenges Catapult will confront encompasses the Navy’s pursuits to re-arm weapons and assets at sea.

“This is something that is really important to the secretary of the Navy and the department. We really want to be able to demonstrate that we can re-arm — we can load missiles on ships while they’re out in theater, right? They don’t have to go back to Guam or Hawaii to load up new missiles. That could be a real game-changer in a fight. And so there’s technologies that could be brought to bear against that challenge,” Proestou said.

“Small businesses are really a goldmine for going faster, and that’s what we are trying to do,” Glassman added. 

Another challenge they intend to get at via Catapult involves creating a new architecture that any small business the Navy partners with in this space will be able to quickly connect into and deploy the existing and emerging capabilities they’re developing.

“One of our biggest challenges — and challenges in the Navy in particular, and why we get a lot of slack, I guess, in the Navy that we’re hard to deal with and so on and so forth — it’s that our systems are really old, and adoption of new technology is really hard. And so getting after this architecture challenge is designed to make adoption for anything that we want to plug in to our systems easier to plug in,” Proestou explained. 

Drawing on his prior experiences as a leading Navy systems engineer, Glassman explained why he’s passionate about enabling more open architectures for the government to seamlessly work with small businesses.

“If you look at our evolving threats that are going on from a mission system, mission capability standpoint — we have two major problems,” he told DefenseScoop.

The first issue, in his view, is that the Navy needs to be able to rapidly adapt and introduce new advanced capabilities in theater — but right now, the foundation and digital architecture to underpin that “are not quite at that point.”

“If you see what’s going on in Ukraine and in the Middle East — it’s neck-breaking, right? You see like, ‘Oh, there’s a countermeasure, a technical countermeasure. It’s been introduced. Oh no, we need to now overcome that.’ Okay, well now it’s going to take a Herculean effort, as opposed to building those architectures knowing that, hey, we’re going to encounter something and we need to be able to deploy a counter to that very, very quickly,” Glassman said. 

His second concern encompasses how America’s contemporary industrial capacity for major weapons systems is optimized only for current demand.

“I mean, it’s down to the penny, right, which is not a warfighting footing. Their factory lines, everything to software development environments, to etc., are optimized right now for our peacetime environment and they have very little surge capacity,” Glassman said. 

One hope is that if this team can help the Navy get the right architecture in place for small businesses with Catapult, it will also make it easier for companies to pivot to meet real-time national security needs.

This is also one element among many initiatives Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition Nickolas Guertin is leading to help the sea service evolve and shift how it conducts business to better prepare for future threat environments. 

“So the idea is, if we can harness these dollars that we have available to us through Catapult, which has been in place for almost a year — but now we’re taking the Catapult program and generating this challenge to go after these specific things that we think will change the business model and the way we do business,” Proestou said.

Those involved in bringing Catapult to fruition are working hand-in-hand with select Navy program offices that are meant to eventually transition the capabilities to the warfighters who will rely on them.

For example, one of the topics is related to the Navy’s program executive office for integrated warfare systems.

“It involves an architecture framework for hosting certain capabilities on air platforms, surface platforms, undersea platforms and seabed platforms. It’s one architecture that can deploy certain capabilities and all that,” Glassman noted. 

A few weeks ago, the officials unveiled this Catapult plan at a small business conference in California.

“While we were out there, I spoke with some of the SBA representatives that were there. I’ve already talked to them about, if we really like something, that we can go in for an SBIR waiver and go up to a $15 million award with this. So it could be a much more significant investment than sort of what might traditionally be familiar with our phase two program,” Proestou said.

While officials want to scale the technologies that work as fast as possible, the team also hopes that this initial push will springboard additional co-investments from other sources — like the Defense Innovation Unit or the Office of Strategic Capital that’s trying to help DOD components leverage additional private capital funds.

Officials are planning to host “ask me anything” sessions on specific topics for those interested in participating in Catapult. Demonstrations could happen as soon as early next year. 

“I would say my definition of success is a program of record that is funded next budget cycle that was built off the work that we did here on Catapult challenge,” Proestou told DefenseScoop.

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Pentagon Chief Information Officer John Sherman formally approved the new requirements on Thursday by canceling the 2020 version of DOD Instruction 5000.82 — then titled “Acquisition of Information Technology” — and issuing its latest iteration, deemed “Acquisition of Digital Capabilities.”

“Use of the term ‘digital’ is a recognition that IT is not just a back-office function. It is critical and increasingly integrated across all capabilities,” Pentagon spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Tim Gorman told DefenseScoop in an email on Friday.

The title change and reformed inclusions, he noted, are meant to reflect the CIO’s recognition that “IT policies apply not just to the traditional notion of networks and computers, but to business and weapons capabilities that must consider aspects like their need for spectrum, their use of cloud services, and their ability to manage software.”

DOD Instruction 5000.82 is one element of the department’s Adaptive Acquisition Framework. 

Broadly, this new document sets the policies and requirements for DOD entities’ procurement of digital assets. 

“It consolidates IT policy requirements for the acquisition community not just for compliance purposes but to help the community ensure that they consider all IT-related aspects of their digital capability acquisition,” Gorman said.

Roots of this revamp “stem from reorganization of policy in support of the Adaptive Acquisition Framework and ensuring that IT policy was appropriately consolidated under the correct functional instruction,” he also noted.

The latest version of this guidance is roughly a dozen pages longer than the 2020 publication. 

Among new additions are sections specifically related to software and cloud infrastructure acquisitions.  

“Software and cloud content is not new, but existed primarily as guidance through memorandums. This instruction codifies that guidance for the acquisition community through a policy issuance,” Gorman said.

New responsibilities, including for DOD’s Research and Engineering directorate, were a result of realigning policy content to organizational charter updates, he confirmed.

“The major updates in this version include alignment with updates to existing policy and codification of guidance that existed as memorandums. For example, this policy codifies the data degrees identified in the Deputy Secretary of Defense Memo, Creating Data Advantage,” Gorman told DefenseScoop.

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A portmanteau of development, security and operations, DevSecOps refers to an evolving software engineering approach that seeks to combine all three of those elements throughout services’ production lifecycle and enable continuous delivery and integration where changes happen regularly over time. It’s key to the functions of Kessel Run, which matured from an innovation-pushing experiment for accelerating military software deployments to a congressionally-mandated program of record over the past five years. 

Last week, Kessel Run released a new umbrella Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) via which it will “pursue innovative approaches to product and service offerings in the software and DevSecOps realm” in the near term.

The overarching objective of this new acquisition pathway is to provide a mechanism for federal and industry stakeholders to jointly “deliver state-of-the-art commercial technology directly to the warfighter,” officials wrote in the federal contracting announcement, adding that, “to do so, the government must broaden its horizons.”

Going forward, this umbrella CSO will be amended each time the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, which heads Kessel Run, issues “calls” on behalf of branch components for what they envision to be “innovative solutions” to fulfill objectives, desired end states, or capability gaps described in the impending requests. Expedited and simplified processes will be used where possible for such procurements.

There is no cumulative ceiling estimated for the opening at this time, but officials suggested in the announcement that individual awards likely wouldn’t exceed $100 million.

The CSO will remain open for the “issuance of calls” until Sept. 30, 2027, officials wrote.

In the announcement, Kessel Run members also briefly highlighted possible call structures and submission processes for short- and longer-term collaboration that may follow. 

This CSO is intended to “serve as a foundation for the program with focused areas of interest” and submission instructions will “come later as specific requirements arise,” they wrote. Kessel Run’s press team did not provide more details on potential technology-aligned areas of interest, or their anticipated timeline, prior to publication.

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The organization, headquartered in Silicon Valley, was launched by the DOD in 2015 to speed up the military’s adoption of commercial technology. Madsen, a former fighter pilot and deputy DIU director, stepped up to temporarily steer the agency on the heels of its former chief’s early exit this month.

“It’s a very deliberate process right now to find the next director — a lot of criteria for that,” Madsen said on Thursday at the Capital Factory’s Fed Supernova conference in Austin, Texas.

Now, “the search for that director has been pulled up to the deputy secretary of defense level,” he confirmed. 

The move means that the Pentagon’s No. 2 official, Hicks, “is personally involved in this, which is a message to the ecosystem of the importance that she sees in the next director,” Madsen added. 

Throughout her tenure, Hicks has made it an explicit priority to help drive technology advancements within the DOD.  

The unfolding search could continue for “who knows? Probably four to six months or so,” according to Madsen, who committed to continuing to serve as acting DIU director and supporting the industrial base until a new agency head is selected.

In his view, the next permanent lead will need to be someone “very, very comfortable with the commercial tech sector and able to translate and convert the commercial world to DOD, which is no small feat.” 

The individual will need to properly articulate how elements like funding cycles, venture capitalism, and other complex government and industry features work, according to Madsen. They’ll also need to have an interest in national security and the right personality and expertise to effectively engage Pentagon leaders on DIU’s impact.

“If anyone knows someone interested, let me know,” Madsen said.

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