National IGE Report: March-April 2025

SAME continues working to advance conversations across military, industry, government, and academia that are making impacts on the pressing engineering challenges of the day.

Nowhere are the benefits of driving partnerships to deliver solutions more apparent than in a forthcoming SAME Perspectives, authored by the Construction COI’s Task Force for Collaborative Delivery. This report will cover insights and recommendations from a lengthy evaluation of alternative delivery methods for military construction programs.

Facing Constraints. Each year, billions of dollars is appropriated for military construction. Building new facilities and infrastructure systems is necessary for United States to compete technologically and project power throughout the world. However, acquisition strategies, delivery methods, and contract types must stay within the framework outlined in the Federal Acquisition Regulation as well as specific statutory codes. These competitive pricing restrictions and the limited number of contract types permissible to the services means the government is unable to apply the contract types, delivery methods, and selection procedures that private sector owners and non-federal public agencies have used for decades.

The military construction programs of the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force have grown significantly during the last decade. The magnitude of these new requirements to rebuild military infrastructure far exceeds what the services have been previously asked to deliver. Traditional delivery models that served well in the past are simply not adequate to meet these requirements and do not allow agencies to obtain the outcomes they desire for schedule and cost certainty. The primary contracting agents, USACE, NAVFAC, and AFCEC, need new acquisition tools to effectively deliver their annual military construction and civil works programs as well as massive new investments like Installations of the Future.

Collaborative Approaches. When SAME’s Construction COI was stood up in 2022, it identified three lines of effort to support industry-government engagement and deliver solutions for key stakeholders, to include collaborative delivery. In pursuit of this line of effort, the COI chartered a Task Force for Collaborative Delivery, which was tasked to investigate collaborative delivery methods currently used by industry to determine if these methods would be of benefit to the service engineering components in executing their construction programs.

The task force focused on collaborative delivery contracting types that optimized the use of early contractor involvement. A forthcoming SAME Perspectives will outline the findings and recommendations from the task force. Publication of the report is anticipated in advance of the 2025 JETC.

Igniting Ideas, Through Collaboration

This year’s Joint Engineer Training Conference, May 13-15 in Louisville, Ky., will feature a lineup of opportunities to engage in topics critical to joint engineering responsibilities and project delivery.

The Warfighter Seminar will return with two topics this year, each very different in scope. The first, a table-top exercise geared toward junior officers and NCOs as well as industry, will focus on a humanitarian assistance and disaster response scenario in the Indo-Pacific, asking participants to address the tactical challenges in planning, sustaining, and transitioning operations in the region. The second topic hosted as part of the Warfighter Seminar will be a hands-on cyber warfare/defense scenario, held as part of the Innovation Pavilion in the Exhibit Hall. Attack scenarios will be introduced and then played out in a cyber model demonstrator provided by ICS Village.

The JETC schedule also includes IGE Roundtables, Listening Sessions, and 70 hours of education sessions geared toward topics impacting readiness, innovation, and performance.