Guy Weichenberg

In this report, researchers describe overarching trends that affect defense acquisition, outline challenges in the defense acquisition process, and suggest improvements that might help address those challenges. The study is informed by open-source documents and insights from publicly available RAND Corporation defense acquisition research, especially reports published since 1986, when a similar review of RAND research was published.

The last F-22A aircraft is scheduled for delivery in early 2012, so decisions must be made as to what tooling will be retained and what will be disposed of. The authors find that, for a modest, one-time additional cost of $17 million and a very small additional annual recurring cost, the Air Force can retain all F-22A unique government tools. They also find a difference of less than $1 billion between the costs of two different restart options.

Cyber mission thread analysis (CMTA), which identifies mission-critical systems in a cyber threat environment, requires a disciplined, well-planned process for its execution. This report provides a proposed planning and implementation guide (1) to perform CMTA expeditiously while still giving results good enough to make decisions about mission criticality, and (2) to analyze multiple missions concurrently.

Organizations throughout the Air Force need better access to contractors? technical data to sustain core military aircraft assets and their subsystems. For this to happen, the U.S. government must have the appropriate license rights and actually possess the data it seeks to use, but personnel often have limited understanding of the role of data rights and deliverables.

The Space Enterprise Vision (SEV) describes an integrated approach to building a force across space mission areas. Achieving this vision requires reducing acquisition time lines and improving integration of the space enterprise. The research team examined potential acquisition approaches to support SEV and identified several promising ones that merit in-depth examination: modular open system architectures, agile acquisition, rapid prototyping.

This report presents a framework for the development of metrics--and a method for scoring them--that indicates how well a U.S. Air Force mission or system is expected to perform in a cyber-contested environment. There are two types of cyber metrics: working-level metrics to counter an adversary's cyber operations and institutional-level metrics to capture any cyber-related organizational deficiencies.

In 2015, the United States and partner governments in the F-35 program began considering the use of a three-year block buy (BB) contract for procurement of F-35 aircraft during fiscal years 2018-2020. This report assesses potential cost savings available through use of a three-year block buy contract for procurement of F-35 aircraft during fiscal years 2018-2020--approximately $2.1 billion, or 4.9 percent of the cost of annual contracting.

When a weapon system ceases production, the tooling not needed for sustainment that cannot be repurposed must either be disposed of or stored. Storage is not free, but system-specific tooling might become necessary for a restart, and starting from scratch can be expensive, although some tools cost more to store than they are worth. The authors examine these tooling retention issues for the C-17 cargo aircraft.