Contracting for Rapid Acquisition

A Practical & Personal Guide to Disrupting the Status Quo for a More Responsive Future

by Lorna E. Tedder

Non-Fiction · Government Contracting & Acquisition

The tools to fix Federal acquisition have existed for decades. So why is everyone still slow?

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Description

Lorna E. Tedder spent more than thirty years as a Department of Defense Contracting Officer doing what colleagues said couldn’t be done: awarding contracts in days instead of years, getting weapons downrange before the funding expired, and bringing warfighters home because the paperwork moved on time. She was the Contracting Officer on the original bunker buster. She built a Rapid Acquisition Cell from scratch. And she did all of it inside the same regulations everyone else complained about.

This is the book she wrote to pass that playbook on.

Contracting for Rapid Acquisition is not another dry policy manual or a victory lap for the latest “revolutionary” reform. It’s a practical, personal guide to moving fast and delivering results in Federal acquisition—written for the people in the trenches and the leaders who decide whether they sink or swim.

Inside, you’ll learn:

• The Trifecta of Effectiveness — why tools, mindset, and relationships have to work together, and why the best tool in the world is worthless without the other two.
• The six Crumblestones — the recurring structural weaknesses (culture, communication gaps, governance, faulty requirements handoffs, broken tracking, and resource constraints) that quietly sink any acquisition strategy, and how to reinforce each one.
• Lorna’s Greatest Hits — her go-to contracting tools, from Procurement for Experimental Purposes and Other Transactions to CSOs, Class J&As, oral proposals, Price-Based Acquisition, “Death Star Scope,” and creative pricing arrangements—with the dates she first used each one (some older than the people now discovering them).
• How to build your own rapid contracting office — reading your patterns, building a portfolio of ready vehicles, developing a team of “fractals,” and protecting what you build from the next leadership change.
• Where AI is taking the contracting workforce — and how to use it as a force multiplier instead of a layoff notice.

Whether you’re a Contracting Officer, Program Manager, contract specialist, or a contractor trying to understand your customer’s chaos, this guide will change how you think about getting things done. It’s short, blunt, occasionally funny, and built to still be useful long after the next reform comes and goes.

“I’ve been called difficult, ahead of my time, and the reason things got done when they shouldn’t have been possible. I’ll take that last one. Proudly. Now, go fix something.”

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Genre & Key Themes

• Primary: Business & Economics / Purchasing & Buying
• Secondary: Political Science / Public Policy / Economic Policy
• Niche: Business & Economics / Government & Business

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About the Author

Lorna E. Tedder spent her career as a Contracting Officer for the Department of Defense, where she built a reputation for challenging the bureaucracy and doing what the rules supposedly didn’t allow—awarding contracts in days instead of years and getting capability into the field before the funding expired. She was the Contracting Officer on the original GBU-28 “bunker buster,” and from 2012 to 2018 she founded and led a Rapid Acquisition Cell that supported Special Operations and other urgent missions with no special authorities and no shortcuts—just the right tools, mindset, and relationships.

She worked everything from operational, specialized, lab, services, and production assignments to staff positions, but it was always quick-reaction acquisition that made her heart sing. Her special sauce is creative solutions; her passion is serving the warfighter, with a particular heart for the Special Operator. She pioneered and championed contracting techniques much of the field still treats as cutting-edge—Procurement for Experimental Purposes, Other Transactions, Commercial Solutions Openings, oral proposals, and Price-Based Acquisition among them, plus a few she coined herself. She has never been afraid to hand that toolbox to the next generation.

After 31 years in the Department of Defense, a year as an independent consultant, and five years serving the public interest at the MITRE Corporation, Lorna retired from Federal acquisition in 2024 to pursue the writing life she’d put on the back burner for decades. An English major by training, a biohacker and pattern reader by inclination, and an unrepentant lover of the em dash, she is also a novelist of speculative fiction. She still weighs in on acquisition, ethics, and leadership when something matters, but her focus now is long-form and creative work.