Analysis of Methodologies and Best Practices for Rapidly Acquiring Technologies to Meet Urgent Warfighter Needs; Master's thesis

摘要

The rapidly changing global security environment that today's military operates within requires an ever-increasing ability to quickly adapt to non-traditional threats. This has forced the United States to re-examine the traditional means of equipping its forces to ensure more agile acquisition practices are available to the Science and Technology (S&T) and acquisition communities. While there have been significant efforts to look towards industry for potential solutions to this problem, the heavily bureaucratic and restrictive government environment has made applying commercial lessons learned difficult. To effectively implement rapid fielding approaches within the government context, research into organizations facing the same or similar constraints must be conducted. The author interviews innovative groups across the U.S. Government who have proven track records for rapidly fielding new technologies to determine the practices and methodologies that keep these organizations on the cutting edge of rapid product delivery. The recommendations of this research can be broadly applied to organizations chartered with rapidly responding to customer needs.