Thomas C Whitmore

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.

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.