"Declaring MOSA is easy, enforcing it is not," Alan Shaffer and Erik Peterson warn — and that blunt observation frames the Department of Defense’s current acquisition pivot.
Two-for-production: reviving second sourcing for critical content
The secretary’s implementing memo for the Acquisition Transformation Strategy calls for a “two-for-production” standard: at least two qualified sources for “critical program content.” The memo seeks to reverse long-standing incentives that favored single or sole sourcing in pursuit of cost efficiency, which the source says produced proprietary franchises and brittle supply chains.
The piece cites historical precedents: split buys of missiles in the 1970s and 1980s reportedly reduced lifecycle costs by about 20 percent and increased reliability by a similar amount. The “engine wars” between Pratt & Whitney and General Electric delivered estimated savings of $2–3 billion over twenty years and doubled reliability per 1,000 engine flight hours. The memo’s standard invites DoD to reconsider second sourcing for major subcomponents — engines and missiles among them — and to apply the concept more broadly across major systems.
Air Force CCA as a test case for modular competition
The Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program is already adopting a multi-vendor approach. The CCA acquisition strategy looks to downselect multiple vendors across its Increments while establishing government reference architectures and operational application programming interfaces (APIs).
Anduril, General Atomics, and Northrop Grumman are building prototypes for Increment 1, and as many as twenty companies are reported to be pursuing competition for Increment 2. The CCA example demonstrates how a government-defined architecture plus operational APIs can enable multiple vendors to compete over time rather than locking capability to a single prime.
MOSA and module-level competition: standards, oversight, and enforcement
MOSA — modular open systems approaches — is central to the memo’s second set of actions. MOSA is presented as a vehicle for module-level competition: common operational interfaces would let DoD “plug and play” industry solutions, create recurring competition for subsystems, and widen opportunities across the industrial base.
But the source emphasizes a practical gap: declaring MOSA is straightforward; ensuring architectures are truly open and enforceable requires robust oversight and clear standards. Without that enforcement, purportedly open designs can devolve into the same proprietary outcomes the reforms aim to correct.
Producibility and the Family of Affordable Mass Munitions (FAMM)
The memo’s third pillar stresses producibility: designing systems that can be manufactured rapidly and at scale. The USAF’s Family of Affordable Mass Munitions (FAMM), conceived by Program Executive Office Weapons, is cited as a concrete program aimed at “affordable and highly manufacturable” missiles with far lower unit costs than current systems.
Sen. Roger Wicker, in a recent hearing, urged “a crash program for a high-low mix of munitions…that must take advantage of simpler designs, and it must lead us to build those designs at scale through advanced manufacturing techniques.” The secretary’s memo envisions decoupling design from production to permit third-party surge manufacturing capacity — an approach the source compares to the rapid shipbuilding of World War II’s Liberty ships.
Supply pressures reinforce the urgency: demand for solid rocket motors (SRMs) rose dramatically since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, prompting DoD investments, new market entrants, and a recent $1 billion agreement with L3Harris. Yet the source notes that long-lead items deep in supply chains remain a sticking point for rapid scale-up.
What this means for the Air Force, Congress, and munitions suppliers
- Air Force: The CCA program will be a practical proving ground for government reference architectures and operational APIs that enable multi-vendor competition and module-level buys.
- Congress: Through creation of an Assistant Secretary focused on international armaments cooperation and by funding programs like FAMM, Congress is positioned to expand coproduction and exportability efforts that build capacity abroad.
- Munitions suppliers and primes: Companies such as L3Harris — which holds a recent $1 billion agreement for SRMs — and the broader supplier base will face pressure to meet producibility goals, supply-chain transparency expectations, and potential multi-source competition for critical components.
The reforms laid out in the memo are ambitious and operationally demanding. The source points out one practical advantage: the strategy was completed in year one of the administration, leaving three full years for implementation. If the department pairs the two-for-production standard, MOSA enforcement, and producibility investments with sustained oversight and industry partnership, the result could be a significantly expanded industrial base, new entrants to the defense market, and fewer supply-chain chokepoints. The alternative is familiar: powerful systems that eventually become proprietary franchises with brittle supply lines — precisely the outcome the memo seeks to prevent.
