A signature educational initiative at the Defense Health Agency, the Defense Acquisition Leadership Academy, or DALA, has produced nine cohorts and trained more than 200 DHA employees on projects with real-world impact.
In April 2020, DHA partnered with the then-named Defense Acquisition University in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to launch the academy. Kathleen Berst, DHA’s acting assistant director for support and component acquisition executive from April 2024 to May 2026, spearheaded efforts to build acquisition expertise within DHA through leadership and team building.
“The academy develops the future of our workforce to create champions of acquisition and collaborate in focused change efforts, as well as develop a key understanding of outcomes — getting the right health care staff and supplies into our military hospitals and clinics — to deliver high-quality healthcare services to all beneficiaries,” said Berst. “These cohorts work directly with leadership throughout DHA to ensure that their training is used to provide crucial solutions to address these urgent challenges.”
DALA’s training provides incoming staff with a foundational knowledge of acquisition, while enhancing learning for those already working in the acquisition field. The program aims to deliver integrated staffing capabilities and reliable medical logistics, ensuring timely, high-quality care for all beneficiaries of the Military Health System.
“Our workforce can create new solutions for great care, explore existing commercial solutions, select the solutions that provide the best outcomes, while applying acquisition rigor to ensure a quick and highly effective solution is fielded for our providers and medical care support staff,” said David Green, DHA chief of the program management office of enterprise medical services, and program lead for DALA.
The impact of the program, according to Green, translates to “quicker treatment, happier patients, family members, and staff,” yielding an overall increase in the health of military hospital and clinic beneficiaries, and enhanced medical readiness in warfighters.
Since 2020, the university has undergone a transformation and changed its name to the Warfighting Acquisition University, or WarU. According to the university, this change is “a sign of our commitment to train and develop the acquisition workforce to take bold, calculated risks and accelerate the delivery of critical capabilities.”
Within the university, DALA underwent its own transformation in 2025 to match growing demand. This included updating its administrative systems and establishing a dedicated management board to:
These updates are pivotal to “strengthening the program's integrity and ensuring that its growth is managed with fairness and clear standards,” Green said. The changes also “ensure the DALA program has a sustainable future — capable of handling continued interest, while maintaining the high program quality.”
Training acquisition in action
Cohorts consist of DHA personnel and DALA faculty who gather project ideas, discuss them, and reach a consensus on which idea to pursue as their group project. This collaborative process builds acquisition proficiency, ensuring that military hospitals and clinics have robust resources to provide joint medical capabilities. If a project is selected as a DHA initiative, a charter is approved to develop an integrated project team with real-world applications.
DALA cohort graduate Abear Dawson, an assistant program manager with DHA, described how access to subject matter experts in the WarU faculty offers DHA employees with a broad perspective and deeper understanding of how the acquisition process comes together.
“It gives you a clear picture of all the parts of the acquisition process in one place, helping you understand some of the challenges that others might have in their areas.”
This shared understanding is a common theme. Green noted students frequently report “their biggest realization is that all sections doing acquisition work had similar challenges” and worked together to devise solutions aimed at delivering joint warfighting capabilities.
Networking within this community of acquisition professionals fosters vital connections, Green added. “Those relationships can nurture and create opportunities for enhanced communication across the enterprise.”
Dawson said her cohort established an acquisition workforce training project, where a collaborative approach to problem solving with WarU faculty proved vital. “To solve an issue that we were seeing across DHA, having WarU be a part of it gave us the expertise of someone who's in that specific field and also helped us think outside the box.”
Green said giving DHA personnel a working knowledge of acquisition processes directly supports readiness and deployability by “speeding up an acquisition from an initial concept to a product or service delivered to the warfighter.”
Those products or services can take the form of healthcare provided to families of deployed service members, helping to minimize stress in the operational environment, Green added.
Because DALA graduates start acquisitions with a strong understanding of the process, “less time is spent on rework, and graduates have direct access to knowledgeable people to assist with any problems,” Green said. “Any time saved during the acquisition of a product or service intended for patient care at a military hospital or clinic would allow that product or service to arrive sooner.”
Green’s experience in a DALA cohort focused on providing supplemental staff for military hospitals and clinics in the event of staffing shortages. After their preliminary work in DALA , the project was adopted as a fully chartered improvement effort.
The project's impact was highly tangible. Green’s cohort “created an organizational framework, developed a user guidebook, drafted a DHA Acquisition Procedural Instruction, and began conducting formal reviews of new requirement projects and periodic performance reviews of current contracts,” he said.
Their work in the cohort led to an overall redesign of DHA’s support structure, adding those revamped “policies, procedures, and practices continue to improve today.”
Joint efforts for a ‘holistic view’ of warfighter readiness
Dawson said her cohort experience broadened her perspective to include the collective efforts across the enterprise, adding “this gave me a holistic view of supporting the lethality and readiness of the force.”
She said a valuable part of the DALA experience was talking with cohort members and listening to others’ perspectives to understand their challenges. Ultimately, she recognized commonalities, noting, “They have a similar issue — someone at a military hospital or clinic with boots on the ground has the same issue as I do,” referring to her role in program management.
Illustrating the tangible mission benefits generated by the DALA curriculum, Dawson’s current project is designed to bridge critical knowledge gaps for incoming personnel.
“Our team’s current DALA project is focused on designing introductory training for those new to DHA to provide a clear picture of our acquisition structure and identify ‘who is who’ across the agency,” she explained.
The project specifically “touches on services acquisition, as that accounts for almost half of our total acquisition spend.” She said by coupling that knowledge with resources for independent research, it can clear pathways for personnel to continue their learning with WarU or access internal DHA acquisition training opportunities.
Green said DALA cohorts thrive when they “seek to understand their role in continuously improving the acquisition processes.” These “opportunities apply bold leadership and support to speed up projects and programs” to provide world-class medical care for our warfighters.
DALA, Green said, “supports the full spectrum of readiness for our warfighters that are training for future deployment.”