Does the Department of Defense have military specifications (milspecs) for soap dispensers?  That’s essentially a claim made by Boeing in response to a DOD IG report showing that the Pentagon paid 80 times more than the commercial price for a soap dispenser for a C-17 aircraft.  It’s not just DOD, either.  Recent discussions with senior civilian agency acquisition officials also indicate that the acquisition workforce, overall, is having to be retrained on why there is a government preference for commercial items.  It’s enough to take you back to the 80’s when parachute pants and Members Only jackets were in fashion as the DOD IG raged against multi-thousand-dollar toilet seats.  Both government and industry seem to be departing from the commercial item preferences established in the mid-1990’s and identified as an acquisition approach that enabled faster procurements featuring current technology.  Buy off the shelf?  You can’t really do that when the government imposes multiple “government only” requirements on the acquisition of IT and commercial software.  Suddenly, that item isn’t as commercial as it had been.  The extra features, creeping in from each side, result in a specialized solution that is most frequently purchased from a specialized contractor, that costs way more than its commercial item cousin.  Industry does much the same thing when it offers to develop a “prototype” of a commercial item, one that often resembles an already-established product, via a SBIR or OTA agreement that comes with fewer contract clauses.  Football wisely has a 2-minute warning at the end of each half stopping play to provide time for each team to assess its approach at a critical moment.  The same thing may be needed in government acquisition.  Commercial item acquisition benefitted the government and industry for nearly 30 years via faster acquisitions and increased market participation.  A return to those roots would solve many of the ills identified in today’s acquisition system.  Industry will likely have to take the lead to once again make that case.  Now is a good time to do just that.