Cost Considerations in Defense Acquisition Decision Making,

The hypothesis of this research paper is that acquisition decision making is biased toward state-of-the-art technological insertion for optimum performance even though this may result in significant cost and schedule impacts. Input, for this hypothesis, was obtained from DOD acquisition decision makers and noted Individuals from industry and academia. This paper also provides an historical outline of U.S. cold war military strategy and its reliance on advanced technological weapons systems acquisition process analysis from selected written material and reviews of various decision making approaches and styles. An alternative satisficing decision making approach was also explored with the input participants. But the main effort of this paper is the analysis of the participant feedback, plus the background analysis, to determine how the DOD community utilizes cost, schedule, and performance tradeoffs In requirements and acquisition decision making. This paper concludes that there is a need for changes in requirements generation and acquisition decision making to affect more parity between performancetechnology and costschedules. DOD needs to make better affordability judgements at the beginning of programs, and do a better job of containing cost and schedule growth during program execution.