Risk taking, commercial tech, and the ARCI program with Bill Johnson

Acquisition Talk

I was pleased to have Bill Johnson on the Acquisition Talk podcast to talk about how he helped bring commercial technology, open architecture, and continuous delivery to the sonar community in the 1990s with the Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion (ARCI) program. Bill was the deputy program manger and pioneered many of the techniques DoD is still trying to go after today, and the results speak for themselves. ARCI achieved a 60-fold decrease in real processing cost, a seven-fold increase in sensor performance, and reduced false alarms by 40 percent. Bill explained that after the Cold War, the RDT&E budget fell by 70 percent for undersea sonar systems. Around the same time, John Walker sold information to the Russians about how the United States detected and classified enemy submarines. Suddenly, their submarines became very quite. Acoustic superiority became a national security imperative. The typical reaction for the defense acquisition system is to demand more money to solve the problem. The general manager of the prime contractor at the time IBM, which later merged into Lockheed Martin, told Bill that they’ve “got deep pockets.” The contractor could keep R&D going while the program office searched for more money. “Hey, we’re part of this problem,” Bill recalled thinking. “We had to leverage the commercial side.” I’d like to thank Bill Johnson for joining me on the Acquisition Talk podcast. There’s a ton more information on ARCI and the case study details of what made it an acquisition success. Important papers and other resources are at the acquisition talk website. Be sure to check them out! This podcast was produced by Eric Lofgren. You can follow me on Twitter @AcqTalk and find more information at https://AcquisitionTalk.com