The Army, having seen an “exponential” growth in its reliance on software to run its critical combat systems over the past decade-and-a-half of warfare, is taking a fresh look at how much of the development and sustainment of computer code ought to be left to contractors and whether it’s time to bring some of that work in-house.

Maj. Gen. Bruce Crawford, the commander of the Army Communications-Electronics Command, told reporters last week that his service relies on service contracts for about 85 percent of the workload involved in writing and sustaining software. The question, he said, is whether that ratio is right.

“Is that a good number? And how do we know that’s a good number? We’re undertaking work right now to try to get after that problem,” he said. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are 10 skill sets we need. Which ones of those are important enough to the Army and the joint team that we should invest in developing government capacity so that they’re government-owned, government-trained? If we go that route in the end, I think industry gets a better deal, because all the rest of those skill sets will be left to industry to compete for.”

Crawford said part of the Army’s concern is that its traditional structures and institutional knowledge for the long-term sustainment of weapons systems are extremely hardware-centric, and, of course, sustainment makes up about 70 percent of the lifecycle cost of any given platform.

As more and more of the costs of developing major combat systems have shifted to software, the Army is not entirely sure it’s invested in the requisite government expertise. And to the extent the Army has the right expertise, it’s unclear whether its software experts are able to work together effectively.

To start to address the latter issue, CECOM hosted the first in a series of “software solariums” at Maryland’s Aberdeen Proving Ground last month. One key takeaway, the Army says, was the need to create a software center of excellence to help oversee and coordinate innovative software development approaches that are already happening in various “pockets of excellence” across the service.

“And there are many other stakeholders in this space across DoD, including NSA and our Air Force teammates,” Crawford said. “Industry was not present at this first solarium because we didn’t have a lot of ideas to push to industry at that time. But the second solarium will be in February, and at that one, we’re going to bring together not only the Carnegie-Mellons of the world and our Army stakeholders, we’re going to invite industry to talk about the strategic questions we’ve developed and offer them the ability to help us.”

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