Philip S Anton

Analyzes the nation's aeronautic testing needs and the effectiveness of and management issues for, NASA's major wind tunnel and test propulsion facilities in serving those needs. The National Aeronautics and Space Adrninistration's (NASA's) wind tunnel and propulsion test facilities continue to be important to U.S. competitiveness across the military, commercial, and space sectors. Unfortunately, managemen tissues are creating real risks to these facilities. NASA needs to develop an aeronautics test technology vision and plan; analyze the viability of a national test facility plan; identify and maintain its minimum set of facilities; and identify financial shared support to keep its underutilized but essential facilities from entering financial collapse.

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.

Congress asked six questions about the extent of, and opportunities to improve, data collection and analytic capabilities in the U.S. Department of Defense to inform acquisition decisions. This report identifies and measures extensive capabilities and recent progress in following commercial best practices. However, barriers to improvement include a culture against data sharing because of concerns about security and oversight burden.

The Department of the Air Force and larger Department of Defense have employed a variety of approaches to speed the acquisition of military capabilities in an effort to keep pace with evolving threats and technology opportunities. In this report, the authors identify and analyze various approaches, assess their suitability for different conditions and types of acquisition, and identify implementation issues.

NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is working to expand flight research in order to advance the maturation and demonstrate the application of new aeronautics concepts and technologies over the next ten years. It therefore asked RAND to assess flight research capabilities and needs, identify any gaps, and develop management options that would facilitate increased and improved flight research.

What aeronautics research should be supported by the U.S. government? What compelling and desirable benefits drive that research? How should the government make these decisions? The authors develop a unified decisionmaking approach for addressing these questions. This framework quantifies the social and economic reasons for the research, balances competing perspectives, and enables transparent explanation of the resulting decisions.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) wind tunnel and propulsion test facilities continue to be important to U.S. competitiveness across the military, commercial, and space sectors. Unfortunately, management issues are creating real risks to these facilities. This technical report supports a companion monograph (Wind Tunnel and Propulsion Test Facilities: An Assessment of NASA's Capabilities to Serve National Needs, MG-178-NASA/OSD), providing more detailed data, observations, and conclusions about the future of NASA's wind tunnel and propulsion test facilities.

This title introduces the Vulnerability Assessment and Mitigation methodology, which guides its users through a comprehensive review of vulnerabilities across all aspects of information systems.