Defence Acquisition Process

Systems Engineering has provided a means whereby the impact of non-technological issues that arise in the Defence Acquisition Process canbe identified, captured and managed this is central to the L125 situation, as the principal reasons for project failure are not technical in nature, and yet technical issues remain the main focus of Science and Technology (S T) inquiry as it relates to project support. Changes to the L125 scope over the past 17 years have been... 

In the early 1990s, the US military acquisition process was subject to more that 1,700 different prescriptive Military Standards/Specifications. In 1994 the (then) US Secretary of Defence, William J. Perry, issued a directive Instead of using Military Specification and Standards the policy was changed to procure against performance specification (or objective regulation, see Section 3.1 above) as the new norm (i.e. what the product is to do, not how it should be made). The idea was to cut costs, and increase innovation by the use of commercial equipment and standards. The use of Military Standards is authorised only as a last resort. 

Table B2.1 show that not only are the design processes different, as indicated in the column Main Characteristics , but the interfaces between the processes and their environments are also quite different, as indicated in the columns Input and Output . Much of the complexity in design comes from these interfaces, and how we handle this complexity therefore depends on which particular process we are considering. We shall return to this issue in Chapter C2, when we discuss how systems engineering has been developed largely within a particular contracting strategy, the acquisition strategy of the US Department of Defense, and how this has been a barrier to applying the systems approach in non-defence industries.

The DoDAF documentation emphasizes that DoDAF is fundamentally about creating a coherent model of the enterprise to enable effective decision-making however, as is evident even from the snapshot above, this framework is very defence-specific, and the decision-making process supported is embedded in the DoD s acquisition framework. In Chapter C6 we shall develop a model that is more directly aimed at commercial enterprises. 

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