Innovations: Accelerating the Acquisition Kill Chain

By Captain Tyler “Weasel” Flansburg (USAF)

August 4, 2021

Preparing Air and Space Force’s top-tier acquirers to meet the operational needs of tomorrow’s multi-domain battlespace.

Air and Space Force acquisition professionals are about to be educated on par with the service’s top guns: Weapons Officers, who serve as military leaders’ key advisors. Weapons officers receive the world’s most advanced training in weapons and tactics.

The new Acquisition Instructors Course (AQIC), with its advanced training curriculum, seeks to provide the same quality to top-tier acquirers. The five-and-one-half-month graduate-level program will be open to civilians and military members in contracting, as well as in program management, finance engineering, and more.

Students will attend top-flight classes in innovative buying techniques—such as commercial solutions openings and other transaction agreements, and digital engineering—and will interact with edgy shops like AFWERX, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AI Accelerator, and RAPIDx, as well as SpaceX and Amazon.

They will return to their units ready to share what they’ve learned and to make it easier for Air Force programs to access the tech and services they need from the best suppliers, whether they’re legacy contractors or new to government.

The military’s kill chain is a six-stage target sequence: Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, and Assess (F2T2EA). A tactical advantage in the kill chain equates to a higher probability of mission success and survivability. The warfighter who completes the F2T2EA sequence first is the victor.

“In today’s dynamic environment ... if we are to beat our competitors in conflict, we must also beat them in development and fielding of capability,” wrote General C.Q. Brown, chief of staff of the Air Force, in his 2020 strategic vision, “Accelerate Change or Lose.”1

For the warfighter to execute the kill chain effectively, acquisition professionals must reinforce the connective tissue between the acquisition and operational communities and accelerate the acquisition kill chain. Acquirers must successfully navigate the defense acquisition system to transform warfighter needs to fielded capabilities. They must accelerate innovation and fielding at the speed of relevance, ensuring warfighter access to modern technology and state-of-the-art assets. 

Our warfighters are counting on acquisition professionals to deliver. It is imperative for the Air Force to invest in a dynamic, operator-integrated, and people-focused training to enable acquisition professionals to out-execute and out-deliver our adversaries—today and in the future.

In June 2020, General Stephen Wilson, former vice chief of staff of the Air Force, officially directed the standup of the Acquisition Instructor Course (AQIC). General Wilson charged the AQIC with creating an Air Force advanced acquisition training curriculum designed to train highly skilled acquisition instructors and leaders in tactical and strategic knowledge to meet the operational needs of tomorrow’s multi-domain battlespace.

The AQIC provides the acquisition enterprise with a graduate-level training pipeline that leverages the methodology of the Air Force Weapons School (USAFWS) and strives to fully integrate acquisition professionals into the schoolhouse, bringing together for the first time top-tier operators and acquirers. There is a need for acquirers to fight side by side with operators to find material solutions when today’s tactics, techniques, and procedures no longer suffice.

In February 2021, General David Allvin, the newly appointed vice chief of staff of the Air Force, reaffirmed the Air Force’s drive to master both kill chains: “Rapid technological advances and the increasing complexity of tomorrow’s battlespace require operators and acquirers be in constant collaboration to accelerate the acquisition kill chain, so our warfighters have access to the most capable and state-of-the-art assets to maintain our competitive advantage. It is strategically and tactically imperative to recognize acquisition as a weapon system itself.”2

The AQIC faces the challenge of acting as a vanguard of cultural change within the broader acquisition enterprise as it works to bridge the gap between acquirers and operators. Graduates of the course will drive acquisition organizations to adopt a more mission-focused, intel-driven decision methodology through constant operator collaboration and routine cross-talks with acquisition intelligence organizations.

As a forerunner in leading cultural change across the acquisition enterprise, Major General Cameron G. Holt, Air Force deputy assistant secretary for contracting, is focused on operationalizing the contracting enterprise. He has charged contracting officers with educating themselves on the missions they support, acting with urgency, and staying focused on results versus merely following established processes.

General Holt’s vision stresses a shift in thinking in key areas: moving from compliance to mission focus, from advisor to leader, from defense to offense, from linear thinking to systemic thinking, and from a bureaucracy to an entrepreneurial environment. These concepts are foundational tenets of the AQIC. In its collaboration with Air Force Contracting, AQIC seeks to sow transition across the acquisition enterprise.

The USAFWS teaches graduate-level instructor courses that provide the world’s most advanced training in weapons and tactics. The goal is to train students to be tactical experts in their combat specialties while also mastering the art of battlespace dominance. Weapons Officers (WOs)—the term used to identify USAFWS graduates—serve as advisors to military leaders at all levels. WOs are the instructors of instructors and take the slogan “Humble, Approachable, Credible” as their creed. They are trained to integrate kinetic and nonkinetic effects across the Air Force and the DoD, to achieve the synergistic effects necessary to win our nation’s conflicts.   

Inclusion as a Weapons Squadron in the USAFWS is AQIC’s goal. It is a rigorous process, and AQIC must fully prove its methodology to meet the Weapons School’s high standards. “We’ve designed the course to bring Air Force Weapons School rigor to the acquisition community and work toward creating a network of Acquisition Weapon Officers who operate by the creed of the Weapons School,” said Colonel Steve Smith, AQIC commandant.3

“If we are going to outpace tomorrow’s threats, we must evolve our acquisition paradigm to field credible capability with speed and agility. The AQIC will build a cadre of future acquirers primed to actively innovate with warfighters and commercial industry on the newest tech to solve emerging threats rather than waiting for the ‘system’ to generate formal requirements,” said Lieutenant General Duke Richardson, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics.4 “Graduates of the AQIC will propagate creative acquisition tactics and techniques across our enterprise to ensure our adversaries are always playing catch-up.”

The course, open to civilian and military members, spans across acquisition career fields such as engineering, program management, contracting, and financial management. It provides five and a half months of training, executed in a multi-phased approach and focused on tactical acquisition integration, operational-to-acquisition integration, and industry-to-academia integration.

In the tactical acquisition integration phase, students receive in-depth education in and exposure to competencies including contracting, finance, program management, system engineering, and logistics and sustainment. Students are immersed in emergent techniques such as the Adaptive Acquisition Framework5, DevSecOps6, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Digital Engineering. They practice unique approaches, such as Other Transaction Authority and Commercial Solutions Openings. AQIC graduates return to acquisition organizations as trained instructors, charged with bringing up the next generation of acquisition leaders. They are expected to embody the cultural ethos of their operational counterparts. Moreover, they serve as a network of acquisition leaders, proliferating best practices and new authorities.

During AQIC, students attend the Core I and Core II academic blocks given to all Weapons School squadrons. Students expand their awareness of warfighter needs and emerge as mission-focused leaders by integrating with intel, cyber, aviation, missiles, space, and other operational units in mission planning and execution. Graduates return to the acquisition community versed in multi-domain operational relevance and equipped with far-reaching relationships to leverage as they continuously strengthen the ties between communities.

In the industry-to-academia integration phase, students strengthen Air Force engagement across industry and academia through collaboration with partners such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology AI Accelerator,7 Georgia Tech Research Institute,8 Air Force Ventures,9 RAPIDx,10 Capital Factory,11 SpaceX,12 and Amazon.13 Graduates become champions for emerging technology, assimilating industry and academia concepts to improve DoD acquisition execution outcomes.

Major General James D. Peccia III, deputy assistant Air Force secretary for budget, sees this era in acquisition and cultural change as a moment of opportunity. “This is an exciting time for the acquisition community, a time where acquirers are helping to lead and shape warfighting capabilities and weapon systems at the beginning of the process, where their expertise and knowledge can instruct what is possible versus what is directed,” he said. “The AQIC will teach acquisition professionals how and when to engage and ultimately provide Air and Space Forces with an agile and better-informed acquisition process.”14

AQIC Commandant Smith is keen on winning acquisition professionals a spot next to the Air Force’s top-flight Weapons Officers. “The Air Force Weapons School is Air Combat Command’s premier warfighter training environment,” he said. “We know acceptance into the Weapons School will improve not only our acquisition process, but our Air and Space Force. It is the right thing to do, so we need to meet that high bar and get the job done. Ultimately, we view placing the Air Force and Space Force’s top-tier operators alongside its top acquirers as fruitful ground to delivering more relevant technology at speed.”15

*Disclaimer: The positions, opinions, and statements in this column are those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions of the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the federal government.

Tyler “Weasel” Flansburg, Captain, USAF

  • Director of Operations, Air Force Materiel Command Detachment 2, Acquisition Instructor Course

Endnotes

  1. www.af.mil/Portals/1/documents/csaf/CSAF_22/CSAF_22_Strategic_Approach_Accelerate_Change_or_Lose_31_Aug_2020.pdf General David W. Allvin. Memorandum: The Acquisition Instructor Course (AQIC). 19 Feb 2021.
  2. Interview with author
  3. Interview with author
  4. https://www.esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/DD/issuances/dodi/500002p.pdf?ver=2020-01-23-144114-093
  5. Short for development, security, and operations—automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle.
  6. https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/devsecops#:~:text=DevSecOps%E2%80%94short%20for%20development%2C%20security,%2C%20deployment%2C%20and%20software%20delivery.
  7. https://aia.mit.edu/
  8. https://gtri.gatech.edu/
  9. https://www.afwerx.af.mil/afventures.html
  10. http://82cons.com/services-table/
  11. https://www.capitalfactory.com/
  12. https://www.spacex.com/
  13. https://www.amazon.com/
  14. Interview with author
  15. Interview with author

The plan is for AQIC graduates to bring up the next generation of acquisition leaders while serving as this generation’s leaders themselves. Key to that will be forging relationships across the national security innovation base, innovative new companies, and the vast federal acquisition innovation ecosystem. AQIC grads are expected to leverage those connections to make better buys and help improve the acquisition process itself.

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