Weapon System Costing. An Investigation into Cause-Effect Relationships

摘要

Cause-Effect Cost Analysis was a technical effort that was terminated after approximately a year. Its purpose was to establish an approach to costing aircraft avionics, turbine engines, and missile systems that would not just estimate end costs, but could provide design engineers with insight as to how those systems generate ownership requirements which, in turn, incur costs. A methodology for analyzing avionics was created. Its major components consisted of two system design characteristics (technology and complexity) that were reasoned to be predictors of selected system ownership requirements. The major difficulty, which also contributed to the project's cancellation was in defining and constructing the quantitative measures of avionics technology and complexity. This paper describes the technical effort up to the point of termination. The avionics approach, as well as the cause-effect concept of weapon system costing, represents only an investigation into causal modeling and does not reflect validated techniques ready for use.