Mark V. Arena

The U.S. government has developed hundreds of approaches to promote and protect critical technologies and their associated industrial base, and the sheer number and diversity of these programs, policies, and initiatives present a logistical challenge for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The authors of this report describe a tool designed to help DoD decisionmakers--upon discovering a risk or vulnerability to a critical technology--quickly and effectively determine relevant approaches to mitigate the problem.

To prepare for its next Defence White Paper, Australia is examining an enterprise-level naval shipbuilding plan. To support this effort, RAND researchers explore the feasibility of Australia sustaining a domestic naval shipbuilding industry compared with buying ships from foreign shipbuilders. The authors outline the complex consequences and trade-offs of both options.

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.

This volume presents a set of lessons learned from Australia's Collins submarine program that could help inform future program managers. Collins was the first submarine built in Australia. RAND investigated how operational requirements were set for the Collins class; explored the acquisition, contracting, design, and build processes that the program employed; and assessed the activities surrounding integrated logistics support for the class.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia asked the RAND Corporation to develop a set of lessons learned from previous submarine programs that could help inform future program managers. This volume presents an overview of five submarine programs in the three countries - the UK's Astute program; the U.S. Navy's Ohio, Seawolf, and Virginia programs; and Australia's Collins program - and identifies lessons that apply to all of them.

This volume presents a set of lessons learned from the United Kingdom's Astute submarine program that could help inform future program managers. Designing and building a submarine requires careful management and oversight and a delegation of roles and responsibilities that recognizes which party - the shipbuilder or the government - is best positioned to manage risks.

The U.S. Navy asked the RAND Corporation to develop a set of lessons learned from previous submarine programs that could help inform future program managers. This volume presents lessons from three U.S. submarine programs. The RAND team looked at how the programs were managed, the issues that affected management decisions, and the outcomes of those decisions. An overarching lesson from the three programs is the importance of program stability. One-liner: This volume presents an overview of lessons learned from three U.S. Navy submarine programs that could help inform future program managers.

Bid protests have been a feature of the U.S. defense acquisition environment for decades. In recent years, the bid protest process has come under increased scrutiny. In response, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 called for a "comprehensive study on the prevalence and impact of bid protests on DoD acquisitions," including the systematic collection and analysis of the characteristics of bid protests and their outcomes.

The report contains two analyses. First, the authors examine the cause of a Nunn-McCurdy unit cost breach of the Joint Precision Approach and Landing System Inc. 1A major defense acquisition program. Second, they document a methodology to assess the performance of an acquisition portfolio. The methodology included identifying objectives, selecting data and metrics, and analyzing visualizations of portfolio performance.

This study provides a program overview of acquisition options available for the Commonwealth of Australia s next generation naval surface combatant and identifies internal and external factors that can influence a major ship acquisition program. The authors address questions relating to available ship design and build options; various phases, options, and decisions; and aspects that can contribute to the success of an acquisition program."

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 U.S. Air Force is facing a number of challenges as a result of the current defense budget downturn along with the uncertainty of its timing and magnitude. RAND examined the challenge of modernizing the Air Force s aircraft fleet while trying to sustain the industrial base with limited funding, considering six budget strategies for aircraft procurement: from a new high-tech fleet to sustaining and modifying the existing one."

Department of Defense policies, procedures, and organizations for program management and oversight of defense acquisition programs do not align well with shipbuilding. Ship acquisition programs have characteristics that deviate from the normal framework in significant ways, resulting in disconnects and some confusion. The authors examine these differences and suggest policies that can better account for them.

Defense acquisition is one of the most urgent issues that the Department of Defense faces today. In an effort to provide the department and the nation with guidance on defense acquisition challenges, the authors present detailed proposals to improve defense acquisition through initiatives focused on competition, novel systems, risk management, organizational factors, prototyping, and the acquisition workforce.

RAND investigated cost-effective workforce-management strategies, alternative workload allocations, and the relevant best practices of comparable organizations to assist the Navy in managing the public shipyards. The Navy uses many practices common in other organizations, but reducing planned levels of overtime and increasing the permanent journeyman staff at the public shipyards could cost-effectively hedge against future workload growth.

This report explores why, in recent decades, military fixed-wing aircraft costs have escalated beyond the rates of commonly used inflation indices, examining both economy-driven factors that the Services cannot control and customer-driven ones that they can. The authors found that this trend of cost increases is true for all types of aircraft

This analysis uses data from Selected Acquisition Reports to determine the causes of cost growth in 35 mature major defense acquisition programs. Four major sources of growth are identified: errors in estimation and scheduling, decisions by the government, financial matters, and miscellaneous. The analysis shows that more than two-thirds of cost growth (measured as simple averages) is caused by decisions, most of which involve quantity changes, requirements growth, and schedule changes.Cost growth in major weapon-systems programs results from errors in estimation and scheduling, government decisions, financial matters, and miscellaneous sources, with decisions involving changes in requirements, quantities, and production schedules the dominant cause.