USSOCOM seeks small-business support to address capability gaps

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May 18, 2026

SOF WEEK 2026--TAMPA.  The United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) intends to expand its vendor base by engaging more nontraditional and small businesses in its acquisition and development programs, stated a USSOCOM acquisitions executive today during an address at this week's SOF Week 2026 exhibition (May 18-21) in Tampa, Florida. She added that the service is interested in working with non-prime vendors to address capability gaps in its inventory.

 

During a session on May 18, the USSOCOM Acquisition Executive, Melissa A. Johnson, asserted that the service is “definitely increasing the ecosystem” with “a lot of venues” to facilitate the access of non-prime contractors to prototype and experiment with the Command.

“We are doing everything from sea to space,” Johnson said. “The portfolio is vast, and it covers about eightyish plus programs of record.”

Those efforts span multiple areas, she said, and aim to enable operators to project power more effectively worldwide by expanding their reach into contested environments.

In that vein, the branch is pursuing autonomous systems and technologies that can be deployed as standalone capabilities as well as in manned/unmanned operations.

The U.S. Army’s 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment tests a swarm of 40 drones. Photo credit: US Army.

Another USSOCOM requirement is deepening the use of low-cost solutions that can provide kinetic and non-kinetic mass effects. The service expects those capacities to be provided by new systems and be integrated with legacy capabilities.

“We are in that realm where we need to flip that cost curve, where we are not paying a million-dollar ammunition to go take out a $10,000 system or $100,000 system in the adversary's backyard,” Johnson noted.

In all the defense domains in which the Command foresees capability gaps, it wants solutions that can be upgraded over their life cycle in order to engage and defeat current and future threats.

USSOCOM is also looking for equipment and technologies to enable those capabilities to be sent to the battlefield and be sustained even in the most austere areas worldwide. According to Johnson, the branch is not interested in locked-type products, nor does it want solutions under which it cannot fully own the data. “We need to make sure that there is a right to repair.”

This approach will also enable new capabilities to pass through soldier touch points and receive feedback for improvements or adjustments to better fit in Special Operations missions.

“We might not have all the answers [on how to plug the capability gaps in the USSOCOM inventory],” Johnson added. “We are looking for you all [small and non-traditional vendors] who can look at things from a different lens and say: ‘Hey, we have a way to solve this problem.’ It might not be what we are thinking; it could be very different, and we are open to that.”

In order to reduce entrance barriers for new providers in the Special Operations vendor base, USSOCOM has been conducting virtual and in-person roundtables with its Program Executive Offices (PEOs) and small business directors to clarify potential doubts.

Vendors can apply to join the next session, scheduled for June 9, with the PEO Fixed Wings: Taking place from 2:00 to 4:00 pm (Eastern Time Zone), the event will be online.

“We want to make sure that we are radically transparent and getting everybody a level setup on the venues, ways, pitfalls, challenges, all that kind of stuff,” Johnson said.