Our guest columnist this month is Art Fries, whose responsibilities include providing analytical inputs to decisions that are as high profile as any in our statistical profession. Art is an employee of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a defense think tank located just outside Washington, DC. IDA conducts work in support of numerous Department of Defense (DoD) sponsors and a limited number of non-DoD sponsors. One of these sponsoring DoD offices, the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOTE), reports to Congress and the Secretary of Defense about the progress and performance of defense systems in the last stage of development before procurement. Testing at this stage, referred to as operational testing, involves as realistic test environments as possible, given various constraints, especially safety. In support of DOTE, IDA teams review proposed operational test strategies and experimental designs, monitor the conduct of the operational testing, and prepare assessments of the test outcomes. Deficiencies in test planning or demonstrated performance shortcomings can result in: a delay in a system passing to production, a return to an earlier stage of development, or, in extreme circumstances, system cancellation. These decisions are clearly extremely sensitive in that the systems in question can cost tens of billions of dollars to procure, much more fundamentally, they play an extremely important role in our national security, and they involve the safety of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, The pressures to expedite system acquisition but at the same time to conduct thorough testing and evaluations are enormous.
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