Rick Kozak / Staff Delores Etter is the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

Encouraging industry to adopt open architecture strategies in program proposals for the U.S. Navy isn’t enough, said the service’s top acquisition official.

The goal now is to write open architecture requirements into contracts and provide companies incentives to meet the goals, said Delores Etter, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

“One of the things in our action list is to figure out what we can do in our contracts to incentivize this,” Etter told an audience Wednesday at the 6th annual C4ISR Journal Integration Conference, New Tools for War in Real Time, in Arlington, Va. “We want to figure out how not just to encourage [open architecture] but to make it a requirement in our programs.”

The issue was discussed in mid-October at an executive meeting chaired by Etter and Adm. Mike Mullen, chief of naval operations, Etter said.

Noting that more than half the cost of a new ship is in mission systems, Etter called open architecture “one of the real enablers for us to do things in the future” and a key to making ships more affordable.

Etter also laid out the Navy’s top open architecture principles:

å Modular design and design disclosure.

å Reuseable application software.

å Interoperable joint warfighting and secure information exchange.

å Life-cycle affordability.

å Encourage competition.

Taking note of the need to involve small companies and academia on a higher level, Etter pointed to technology collaboration centers run by the Navy, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman as places where third parties can “come and plug in and try out upgrades or new capabilities. This is particularly important, she said, “for academia and small companies without the classified access the large companies have.”

Etter pointed to the submarine community’s successful Advanced Rapid Commercial Off-The Shelf Insertion (ARCI) program as the template for adapting open architecture principles into other acquisition areas. Buying items once that can be used many times, she said, “is the model of what we can do with open architecture.”

Etter is also taking action to improve the Navy’s efforts at implementing open architecture principles and gaining efficiencies across different ship designs by strengthening the role of the Program Executive Officer for Integrated Warfare Systems at the Naval Sea Systems Command.

“I’m going to make him a stronger player,” she said. “We have a lot of things in the integrated warfare system. I see the PEOIWS as really the key player in that and to do that they need not only responsibility and authority. So I’m making some changes — realigning some of the internal organization.”

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