Improving the Process for Developing Capability Requirements for Department of Defense (DoD) Acquisition Programs

The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) is the Department of Defenses (DoD) formal requirements approval process. It is important to develop and validate joint warfighting capability needs as the basis for acquisition programs. However, for capabilities that need to keep pace with evolving technologies, process delays in requirements validation can cause commensurate delays in delivery of capabilities to the warfighter. The JCIDS deliberate path (as opposed to the JCIDS urgent path) is designed to strike a balance in speed and thoroughness but is often slow in practice. In the FY 21 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress expressed concern that JCIDS is too slow to keep pace with threats and technology, directing the DoD to develop recommendations for streamlining JCIDS. In support of the DoDs response, in 2022, the Acquisition Innovation Research Center (AIRC) modeled the JCIDS process and used the model to assess the effects of proposed process improvements [AIRC (2022)]. The 2022 AIRC study found that for a sample of 20 Navy programs, JCIDS staffing of a Capability Development Document (CDD) took an average of 336 days. The 2022 study also found that the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had developed a streamlined requirements process that could reduce requirements review and approval times by more than 50 percent. The research team recommended that a SOCOM-like process be quantitatively assessed for speed, piloted in the Military Services, and, if successful, adopted for all but the largest acquisition programs as an alternative to JCIDS. This report summarizes the follow-on analysis of the SOCOM process, verifying that it is indeed significantly faster than the JCIDS process.