Comparative Analysis of the Cost of Oversight of Major Defense Acquisition Programs Strictly under the Direction of the Department of Defense 5000 Series of Instructions

摘要

The United States Department of Defense has been caught in a continual cycle of acquisition reform since its inception over two hundred years ago. The goal of acquisition reform has always been to find the perfect balance between the amount of program oversight and the amount of flexibility in which program managers are allowed to manage their programs. The only truth learned throughout this process is that defense acquisition does need oversight and that there is no cookie cutter pattern for oversight that will fit all types of acquisition programs equally well. That being said, the focus of this thesis will be to explore the foundations of oversight for programs following Department of Defense Directive 5000 -- the defense acquisition bible -- and employ Delphi survey techniques to develop an estimate of the actual cost of oversight for defense acquisition programs that are under the guidance of the DoDD 5000. The real value of this research will be to compare the oversight cost estimates for programs under the DoDD 5000 to oversight cost estimates developed using the exact same methodology, but examining programs with different types of oversight. Specifically, space acquisition and communications acquisition have been operating under different oversight formats over the last few years, and the interest is in determining if the changes have made defense acquisition any more efficient and any less costly. (58 tables, 3 figures, 44 refs.).