Just before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bradford Powell joined U.S. Air Force ROTC at the University of Iowa because he wanted to actively serve the country after graduation, rather than sit idly behind a desk. As fate would have it though, post-9/11, he became an acquisition officer and ended up doing a fair amount of desk work for a little over four years. Thankfully for the contracting industry, he grew to love the work, and despite eventually exiting the Air Force, has stayed supporting the Department of Defense on the industry side ever since.
Powell subsequently worked at some of the most prominent names in GovCon, such as Cubic, and spent an impactful decade at Northrop Grumman, culminating in the position of operating unit director. He began lending his talents to the team at Ultra Intelligence and Communications in August 2023 as president of the command, control, intelligence and encryption group.
GovCon Wire had the privilege of speaking with Powell in a detailed conversation about the ways the DOD’s approach to buying new goods and services has changed, where it still needs to grow and how Ultra I&C is enabling the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control mission.
GovCon Wire: What is your role in the technology pipeline?
Bradford Powell: As president of the command, control, intelligence and encryption group, I lead a team of engineers and oversee product responsibilities. We’re primarily a product company, offering a mix of software and hardware focused on connecting people. Whether it’s the joint forces or coalition partners, our systems for command and control must communicate seamlessly and in a timely manner, ensuring successful missions, awareness of both friendly and enemy positions, and security through our encryption products. My role is to ensure our team is staffed with the right expertise to build and deliver these capabilities, resource them correctly, engage with customers to understand their needs and align our internal strategy and resources accordingly. I also continuously assess our performance and the benefits of adopting new technologies faster.
We have a robust set of products that have been fielded and used by our customers for a long time. It’s important to balance delivering current capabilities with keeping pace with where our customers want to go in the future. My job is to help set that balance and ensure we’re consistently engaged with our customers to understand their evolving needs. Each service has different focuses, and it’s crucial to take all that in, identify where we can best help, and then allocate our time to evolve our products from where they are today to where they need to be in the future. Ideally, we deliver capabilities that are ready when our customers need them, or even a bit ahead of time, so they can experiment and innovate. This engagement also informs our decision-making regarding the next best steps.
GovCon Wire: How are acquisition pathways like the software acquisition pathway helping to get new technologies fielded faster and what is Ultra I&C’s experience with these new programs specifically?
Bradford Powell: Over the last five to six years, the government has realized that buying software is different from buying a battleship. Many in our customer organizations are familiar with purchasing software on their own, and they understand that software is never truly finished—it’s something you continuously iterate on. The idea that you complete a software product and deliver it as a final product is outdated. The new software acquisition pathway has recognized this and provided our customers with the tools to buy software in a way that makes sense in 2024, allowing for a continuous feedback loop to ensure product quality.
There was a time when the only feedback you could get was through a formal requirements document, and you were essentially guessing if your products met the need. The new approaches and processes now allow us to sit with customers, let them use our products, and identify what’s working, what’s not, where there are gaps, and when it makes sense to update our products or bring in third-party capabilities. This has introduced a lot of flexibility and sped up processes. The services are still figuring it out and learning to deploy these new methods, but as they become more ingrained in how they operate, I believe it will continue to be a positive development.
The government has also started to embrace the idea of continuous improvement. We’ve adopted a commercial model that focuses on continuous authority to operate, or ATO. We recognize the importance of security in our products, especially as cyber threats are never going away, and everything we build needs to be inherently secure. So, we decided to engage with the Air Force and create a continuous ATO for our product, which we successfully accredited.
We’re already seeing positive impacts with our customers. They can now deploy a commercial product on their network, knowing it’s cyber-hardened, without worrying about security—a process that used to involve a three to six-month paperwork nightmare. This is one of the very positive outcomes of the new pathways and the innovations on the acquisition side. We’re optimistic that other traditionally lengthy processes can also begin to adopt this kind of automation, building in continuous improvement at a technical level from the ground up. We’ve had some success in this area and look forward to working with the government to achieve even more.
GovCon Wire: How are these new acquisition strategies helping to achieve Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a.k.a. CJADC2?
Bradford Powell: It goes back to speed and ensuring that you can match technologies with needs. The services, as seen in the news, recognize the importance of engaging more with the commercial industry, especially when it comes to software. There’s a shift away from the traditional model of writing a long list of software requirements, hiring hundreds of people to write code all day and then eventually delivering a piece of software. For CJADC2, this updated model has allowed them to break down the huge problem of connecting everything—from the tiniest sensor on an aircraft to the largest platform miles away—into smaller, manageable parts.
The only way to tackle such a big problem is to break it down and address each part individually. The new acquisition strategies are enabling this. While there are still pockets within the government that hold onto the old mindset—preferring to build everything organically with an army of people rather than considering commercial alternatives—these groups are falling further behind in delivering the capabilities our customers need. As a result, I believe the shift towards more modern approaches will continue.
With CJADC2 and the need to address such a large scale, it’s essential to create economic incentives to solve problems in a distributed way rather than trying to find one centralized solution. The scale of the problem is too big to solve with a single answer, as we’ve seen many times since the mid-1990s with the idea of solving everything with one big program. I think the combination of these new acquisition processes and the vision for CJADC2 will align well and get us where we need to be.
GovCon Wire: Getting ambitious, what is the biggest impact you envision Ultra I&C having on CJADC2?
Bradford Powell: When I was a brand-new acquisitions officer in the Air Force Tactical Data Link System Program Office, there were fundamental interoperability challenges within the services. For example, the F-15C had trouble communicating with the F-15E at a data level. Even 20 years later, it’s still shocking to me that some of these basic data interoperability issues persist in the field despite there being commercial solutions that have existed since I was a lieutenant. You’d be surprised how often people who should be able to communicate seamlessly can’t, and this isn’t really a technology problem—it’s a technology adoption problem.
Ideally, I’d like to see the services come to commercial providers like us and say, ‘We don’t want to spend any more money on data interoperability. Why don’t we just buy your product, deploy it and solve that problem?’ That way, they can focus on creating warfighter effects or war power effects to execute their missions.
We don’t think about which cell phone provider someone uses—Verizon, Sprint, AT&T—because cell phone interoperability hasn’t been an issue for 30 years. There’s no reason why the Department of Defense should still face data interoperability challenges. We’re working to help achieve that level of interoperability sooner rather than later and then collaborate with our customers to ask: Now that we can talk, how do we achieve the next level of effects we’re looking for?
