Experiences Using Online War Games to Improve the Business of Naval Systems Acquisition

摘要

Each year the US Navy spends billions of dollars to maintain and upgrade the readiness of war-fighting systems on its sea-, air-, and land-based platforms. The Navy must find ways to meet its growing maintenance needs at ever lower cost as defense budgets continue to shrink. This requires changes in business relationships between acquisition organizations and their contractors to identify new acquisition strategies, policies, processes, and technical architectures. In short, there is a compelling need for new business and technical models to support defense acquisition reform. To better understand these challenges - and to identify incentives that will help it meet its future demands - the Navy recently ran two Massive Multiplayer Online War Games Leveraging the Internet (MMOWGLIs).1 This article describes how the Navy used these games to crowdsource novel ideas from contractors, government staff, and academics on how to encourage industry and the acquisition workforce to find innovative ways to develop, sustain, and apply robust competition to the acquisition of naval systems.