Achieving Performance-based Lifecycle Management

摘要

In July of 2008, Mr. John J. Young, Jr., Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Technology and Logistics, issued a memorandum titled Implementing Lifecycle Management Framework. The memorandum addresses the need for Performance-based Lifecycle Management and is the Department of Defense's (DoD) most recent effort to improve weapon system readiness while reducing costs and cycle-times. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States DoD developed and refined an acquisition process focused on responding to a predictable, monolithic threat. The process built upon several underlying principles, including a desire for US technological superiority, a competitive industrial base, and a relatively long planning and requirements horizon. Over the course of 60 years, the DoD attempted to improve its acquisition and lifecycle process through a series of incremental changes to address requirements creep, cost growth, funding instability and technical risk. Currently, the US faces significant economic and national security threats from nearpeer competitors, rogue states, and transnational terrorist organizations. This multiplicity of threats requires an agile, cost-efficient process to mature and sustain military capabilities. A fundamental change to DoD lifecycle management is required to achieve that necessary agility. This paper explores fundamental changes within government and industry to evolve a highly agile and responsive lifecycle process. Such a process would include effects-based requirements to enable effective cost/performance trades, a commercially driven research and development model to instill technology and requirements discipline, and industry provided lifecycle product support based on best-in- class performance. This paper summarizes those changes to enable and enhanced readiness.