Acquisition Logistics in a Program Management World

Acquisition Logistics in a Program Management World

Assignment 1 in Module 10:

Acquisition Logistics in a Program Management World

The article can be summarized as the performance of weapon systems as described in this report is evidence that they demand much more money than planned to remain ready. DOD should consider each of these recommendations as parts of a whole solution for its “death spiral”—that is, the inability to modernize its forces because the cost to operate and maintain unreliable weapon systems at needed readiness rates constantly impinges on its modernization budget. Taken as a whole, our recommendations encourage DOD's requirement setters to demand readiness at an affordable cost as a part of a system's performance, provide a mechanism to hold the product developer accountable for determining the reliability needed to satisfy DOD's requirements, and provide contractual incentives for the product developer to build reliability into a weapon system very early in its development. The details of DOD's response to each recommendation are summarized below along with our rebuttal.

According to the authors of the reseach report; DOD has initiatives underway that partially address the issue of controlling operating and support costs. However, without significant emphasis on providing a better framework for decision-making, these initiatives will not yield sufficient improvements. The belwo graph shows the percent of the life cycle costs determined at various points in the acquisition process.

The department has encouraged the services to include key performance parameters in its newer developments such as the Joint Strike Fighter that indicate how long a system must perform between maintenance actions. It has moved to follow best practices for reducing risk from technology and achieving more stable designs in the Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle and the Joint Strike Fighter. However, these programs are early in development and it will take some time to see how reliably they perform. The authors beieve that practices found at the commercial companies we visited to make operating and support costs and product readiness requirements equal in priority to other performance characteristics forces developers to focus on achieving high reliability and that adopting these practices will help DOD achieve high readiness and control total ownership cost.

In the article the authos recommend that the DOD should take steps to make the cost to operate and support weapon systems at required readiness rates a priority when setting weapon system requirements for an affordable weapon system and finalizing the design of the selected system. To do this, its requirements and acquisition communities must collaborate to fully understand and control the costs to operate and support a weapon system prior to and early in product development, when it is possible to have significant impact on those costs. In establishing requirements for a weapon system, the requirements community should include the costs to operate and support the weapon system over its life cycle and the readiness rate for the weapon system. To establish an affordable design for the weapon system, the acquisition community and acquisition programs should ...