In some cases, yes; in some cases, no, it is not.
I think back to my point that when we talk about procurement, are we talking platforms or other things? I would say, as an engineer myself, that in the civilian sector you see standards and things that occur around communications from organizations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE, and you can acquire very quickly, but the problem—and we've experienced it—is that when we've been leading-edge in acquisition, or faster than allies, we lose interoperability because some of our key allies are not keeping up with us. It's almost who goes when, and what happens then.
Interoperability is not just about speed of acquisition, but it's ensuring, in the context of NATO, that we're all actually taking the same step at the same time. We're better off to be behind but able to communicate with each, rather than being rapid and losing that.
The standards I talked about are really important for us. Some are in communications; some are in environmental and naval architecture and things of that nature. For communications, for some systems, because those authorities are further down, we are more agile than in the very large procurements that include offsets and other things.
What we are trying to do in many cases now, when we go to get authorities for surface combatants or other areas, is to establish from the outset that rather than doing big mid-life refits and so on, there will be continuous technical refresh, continuous technical insertion. We will seek authorities from the board and from other places that enable us to establish a contract that says that as the U.S. Air Force upgrades its C-17s with new communications, every time our aircraft goes through the repair and overhaul pipeline, it comes back upgraded. We're trying to change some of those approaches so that we are less requirement-specific in terms of “We need to do this” and more about “How do we keep pace with our allies?”
It really is more about keeping pace than it is about speed of advance.