Use of Public-Private Partnerships to Meet Future Army Needs

The Arroyo Center was asked to assist Army Materiel Command by creating a strategy for managing the development of advanced technologies, with special attention to the changing future environment for research and development. In previous phases of this project, the authors showed that the Army has significant opportunities to do collaborative research with industry. Moreover, they documented new concepts the Army can use to implement a collaborative policy and showed how effective those concepts would be in attracting nontraditional suppliers. In this report, the authors expand on the notion of a collaborative research strategy and discuss the utility of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the management and development of Army infrastructure, intellectual property, and financial arrangements. They discuss how PPPs can benefit the Army through opportunities to leverage assets, reduce costs, create new assets or capabilities, be an alternative approach to Base Realignment and Closure Actions, and generate revenue. The federal government has begun to recognize the mutually beneficial returns of such partnerships. For the past two decades, legislative changes and actions by federal agencies have together created an environment more conducive to PPPs. Moreover, the continued growth of PPPs at the local government level will spur federal bodies such as the Army to engage in more PPPs in the future. As the use of PPPs grows, more innovation is also likely in order to accommodate the variety of situations in which PPPs will be applied. Some innovations will be extensions of existing programs, others will be borrowed from the academic or commercial worlds, and some will be completely new concepts. As PPP innovations emerge, the Army will have to evaluate new concepts with respect to feasibility and the benefits each concept is likely to bring. These evaluations can be combined to yield a strategic approach to expanding the Army's use of PPPs.