OTHER TRANSACTION AUTHORITY (OTA) APPLICATION FOR WARFIGHTING DEVELOPMENT

Naval Special Warfare (NSW) forces are often regarded as the best trained, most flexible, rapidly deployable, and most innovative forces in the Armed Services, yet, a clunky and troubled acquisition history has presented obstacles to find emerging, new, disruptive concepts that allow us to compete against the world’s Great Power Competition. How can we improve warfighter development within NSW and create acquisition agility and flexibility? The purpose of our project is to analyze Other Transaction Authority (OTA) use to procure and develop innovative technology solutions that benefit the warfighter. By using Information Warfare Research Project’s (IWRP) OTA consortium, we will act as consultants to Naval Special Warfare Command (WARCOM) throughout procurement of the Interactive Synthetic Environment (ISE). ISE will act as a case study for this acquisition vehicle but will also be analyzed as an innovative prototyping technology in NSW. Traditional prototypes help to test and validate the desired warfighter capability; however, in many cases, the development of a proper prototype is too difficult, expensive, and time consuming. ISE is an emerging technology development initiative to produce a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) prototype of a virtual environment that can make it possible to collect valuable usage and design data to make a go/no-go decision, or to refine a new capability at a fraction of the cost of traditional prototypes.