The Department of Defense's Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations

In 1994, the Clinton Administration began a program aimed at changing the way in which the Department of Defense DoD develops and fields certain military equipment. The initiative is made up of projects known as advanced concept technology demonstrations ACTDs, which are designed to take relatively mature technologies and let battlefield commanders determine, in an operational setting, whether the new systems address their needs. The program grew out of the perception that the militarys traditional approach to acquisitiona series of stages used to develop and procure equipmenthad grown overly cumbersome and prevented DoD from exploiting the benefits of emerging technologies quickly. The rationale for ACTDs was that they would offer more flexibility, allowing battlefield commanders to evaluate a new concept over a two- to four-year period before DoD invested the time and money required for the formal acquisition process. Over the 1995-1998 period, spending on the ACTD program3.2 billion, or slightly more than 2 percentis a relatively small share of the 143 billion DoD has allocated to defense research, development, testing, and evaluation. Yet the programs proponents argue that its potential payback could be substantially greater. Some of the ACTDs are operational prototypes for what will ultimately become acquisition programs with costs many times greater than those of the demonstration project. Successful demonstration of a prototype may allow DoD to help control costs for those larger programs by evaluating the equipment earlier in the acquisition process.