Charles Nemfakos

The authors explore defense contractor motivations and identify mechanisms that might more closely align those incentives with Department of Defense goals. They also analyze major defense acquisition programs to determine if it is possible to identify programs that might incur a future Nunn-McCurdy breach by reviewing a number of acquisition programs that have incurred breaches and analyzing them for common characteristics.

The authors investigate whether the tenure of program managers contributes to Nunn-McCurdy breaches. They also examine the existing decentralized systems used to track cost growth to determine whether additional guidance and control are needed to make acquisition category II programs performance more transparent. Finally, they investigate whether key assumptions, so-called framing assumptions, could be useful risk management tools.

The report presents the results of two studies: The first compares the capabilities and development approaches used in the Joint Tactical Radio System wideband networking waveform and the commercial long-term evolution waveform, and the second analyzes military acquisition programs that have exceeded certain cost thresholds more than once.

The swift adoption of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and their increasing use in the field have exceeded the capacity of the training infrastructure to sustain training on these systems over the long term. This report develops a general concept for training military forces in employment of UASs and a framework for addressing the training requirements and discusses the limits of existing infrastructure in supporting UAS training.

This report chronicles intelligence community efforts over more than half a decade to improve community-wide workforce planning and management. As decisionmakers look ahead to an era of constrained budgets, they must avoid repeating earlier workforce planning mistakes because the consequences of such mistakes can be long lasting. The tools described will help decisionmakers maintain workforce capabilities as budgets decline

The passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act ushered in an era of sweeping change in U.S. military acquisition policies and processes. Reform was necessary, but the legislation's implementation resulted in a host of unintended and undesirable consequences, especially in the Department of the Navy. Drawing on research, interviews, and their own professional experience, the authors examine these negative effects and propose associated recommendations.