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Top 10 Program Manager Skills Execute Process in Every Phase of Weapons Systems Deployment Project

6/20/2020

2 Comments

 
All parts of our weapons systems program must execute smartly, and we constantly are examining steps that can reduce schedule risks and improve quality of product. The program is considered a high priority in part to ensure the resources we need to execute the program are not endangered. We are always reviewing our ongoing affordability initiatives.

We would like to share that everything that everything we do is focused on delivering the required capability to the Warfighter in the most affordable and timely manner possible while meeting our commitments, and we are continually seeking to drive cost out of the program and maximize the dollars entrusted to execute this program.

An accelerated/high risk program requires a stable funding profile, especially early in the program. The accelerated acquisition construct results in unusual budget and financial execution metrics. Minor budget changes/corrections or marks to the program have significant impact due to compressed time for analysis and recovery.

Program requirements and their relationship to threats have been thoroughly scrubbed with design and system development elements of the program tightly coordinated with stakeholders. Technical risks are well understood with sound mitigation strategies aligned to earliest retirement prior to lead system construction. Since achieving lead system and follow “ready for patrol” milestones are paramount to meeting mission
requirements

We are on track for cost and performance, and system development is on schedule. Challenges remain in program oversight, program staffing, test schedule, production quantities, and integration with other systems. Opportunities include introduction of a new Mission Control Station, and a common baseline for system model types.

We have several major development efforts, which are closely monitored with respect to the program controls regarding cost, schedule and performance. All stakeholders must act as a team to execute our current program activity within cost and schedule constraints. The program impact of shifting of funding, and the generation of disruptive, unplanned activity, creates problems.

We have to manage a highly technical, challenging program with associated risks. However, we have a very methodical, build-up prototype testing and risk management approach in support of design/technology maturation in order to minimize risk and increase confidence in a successful effort leading to production and fielding of this critical capability. .

We have established an initiative to improve weapons system program office reliability. The results of that effort give confidence that we are aggressively progressing up the reliability growth curve to meet reliability requirements, though further work is required and continued diligence.

Our sustainment team has worked extremely hard to put a lot of effort into our Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) efforts, getting a head start on our understanding of risk areas for R&M by staffing maintenance monitors throughout the testing at by incorporating Supportability Test and Evaluation into our ground test program, and by improving on known R&M cost drivers.

The assessment is that, while we are not where we need to be for reliability, we really are not in too bad of shape either when looked at in the context of what it takes to introduce a new system of this complexity. The fundamental building blocks all work.

We received the proposal and continue to work through the contractual actions required to get to award. This remains one of our highest priorities and we have undertaken an effort to monitor progress daily to ensure we stay on schedule for award.

As far as areas of concern, we have multiple areas that we are paying close attention to and sharing for your awareness but not looking for help. The first is getting our prime contractor under contract in a timely manner to execute the program in front of us. We have a highly competent team that has continued to perform at a high level for a long time.

There is a key areas where our track record is not as good as we would like. One area is Quality Management. We have a history of quality escapes where vendors have provided noncompliant parts, and our management process did not detect those escapes until after they were installed in subsystems. We have focused special effort on vendor inspections, first article inspections, and acceptance testing to turn this around.

Another area of concern is contracting. We are currently war-gaming options that include requesting the extension of critical scope through completion of development while exploring opportunities to compete other parts of the program.

These potential competitive opportunities include all up round production, operations and support of the fielded system, system level engineering, test support, and some portions of the ground system. Breaking out these areas for competitive award provides opportunity for future cost savings. We will need to step up our game with integrating these functions to maintain a closely coupled system.

We are working multiple procurement actions, all in different stages of execution. Through the normal course of retirements, rotations, and promotion opportunities elsewhere, we have undergone a fairly significant turnover in personnel where we have lost significant experience and institutional knowledge specific to the program.

Even with qualified personnel, ours, like any program, requires time on station to be fully effective in order to execute efficiently. The net effect is it takes longer to execute as we collectively grow and come up to speed as a team. We may go slow for a while in order to go fast in the long run.

Another problem we have is that the manning structure does not support an increasing workload. This is manifested in struggling to meet schedules and constantly re-prioritizing work to ensure we do not lose money, exceed proposal validity dates, etc.

The current composition, numbers and skills, was designed to support the original program strategy, where heavy reliance was placed on the vendor for support and resolution of issues with program office oversight. Over the past several years, we have seen a steady increase in technical issues and wear and tear on the aircraft.

We have program staffing challenges in the area of contracting. Shortages of Contract Specialists have put us behind in contract awards and make it difficult to get sufficient contract input early in the procurement planning process. While our existing workforce is hard-working and extremely motivated, there is a shortage of experience and insufficient numbers to produce work of the desired quality and quantity.

Another staffing concern is in program management. While current staffing is sufficient, continued pressure on manning levels gives us concern we will lose some of the billets needed to properly plan and monitor execution of our procurements.

The program is progressing through system design, having completed to-date the System Requirements Review at which the system requirements baseline was formally established, and the System Functional Review, at which the system functional baseline was established, and is scheduled to complete the Preliminary Design Review with establishment of the system allocated baseline.

Prototyping and test activity provides for data to inform the system design process as well as a methodical approach to risk reduction to—and increased confidence in—the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase and meeting of system Key Performance Parameters/Attributes .

We have demonstrated labor savings from optimized modular construction plans. An examination looks at multiple elements of construction, including the best strategy of major ship module construction between contractors and how to best capitalize on material and component procurements from the industrial base.

We produced a tailored set documentation for our upcoming milestone and achieve the proper balance for a build program for statutory compliance, appropriate oversight, and value-added efforts for the program office to generate documents that are useful to our ability to execute our mission.

We have said there should be an opportunity established up-front for all future non-developmental, commercial-based recapitalization programs to make the same decision earlier so as to afford maximum program benefit, including avoidance of unnecessary program efforts and documentation development.

The program has been on track for key areas of focus including the System Development and Demonstration, the transition to production, preparations for fleet integration and introduction occuring following Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) in and the initiation of the development effort for a capability upgrade.

We have focused the review boards on prioritizing our deficiency trouble reports, and on aligning that prioritization with their potential to manifest as deficiencies from the test team or as risk to satisfaction of an IOT&E Measure of Effectiveness or Suitability.

We will align the build to correct all the deficiencies that we can within the cost and schedule parameters that we have, and will ensure we have a thorough understanding of the risk or work-arounds for those deficiencies we are not able to fix prior to IOT&E.

We manage risk through close collaboration between the daily review boards, our development team’s weekly cost and schedule reviews, our test team daily and weekly reviews, and PM reviews. Each of these elements is a collaborative effort and pressure points are the volume of deficiencies we will have to manage.

Management is key to maximizing functionality and meeting schedule. We have some margin with the schedule, and we work every day to balance discovery that might drive delays with opportunities to accelerate, with emphasis on applying execution reality to our attempts to capture those opportunities.

Our production team has done an excellent job gaining insight into why our system costs what it does to produce, and we are using that insight to establish the best incentive arrangements for our production contracts. Our focus is on the cost of poor quality, indirect costs, and schedule.

We will incentivize quality so that we do not have excessive scrap rates built into supplier costs, we will target indirect costs deep into the supply chain, and we will incentivize reduced lead time to meet our delivery needs and reduce build time cost.

We are doing Business Case Analyses to identify the optimum sources of depot repair and analyzing how to drive repair of items to the lowest level, understanding that it is less expensive to repair items at an operator level instead of a depot level. As the program progresses, we will continue to use an events-based approach but will work to instill increased schedule discipline without being reckless.

The Program Office has been awarding single-year contracts for production and sustainment. We are trying to break that cycle. The production contract is planned to have a base year with multiple option years. The contractor has struggled to get the cost data from their suppliers to support it. If we have to, we will award the single year and re-attack, but we have not given up yet. The sustainment contract was originally planned for an even longer period of performance.

Pulling us back to a shorter multi-option year contract is not ideal, but this would still give us breathing room before negotiating the next one and at least break the single year paradigm. The next contract we are awarding is our next system improvement contract. This could be an interesting negotiation, as we did not receive the funding to support all the system changes.

Despite the success in executing to the recovery plan, we need to see continued maturation in contractor production processes, as well as improvements in subcontractor and supply chain management. There remain inefficiencies which may impact execution and cost when the production quantities increase.

Engaging with the prime, first, and second-tier vendors is a step forward. We had reduced onsite visits in the past but apparently swung the needle too far. We have seen benefit with the increased contractor site visits. We also placed pressure on other agencies for improved support. This effort had been lacking for some time, but now overall support has been excellent and effective.

It was evident that material cost and labor rates were increasing for suppliers. We have been very engaged with contractor not just for their cost analysis, but to support an assessment of the industrial base. We had them conduct an initial criticality and fragility analysis and based on the result, we identified several vendors that we need to monitor more closely.

But some contract compliance requirements are levied on the programs without funding, causing planned capabilities to be pushed to the right or out of scope completely. If the new contracting compliance requirements were bundled and sent out on a scheduled basis with sufficient funding and time to implement, the programs could make the necessary adjustments without negative consequences on program objectives.

An area where our programs need help is in the cycle time for review and approval of acquisition milestone and contracting documents. Specific concerns include the serial nature of the process, the requirement to include documents that are ancillary and/or premature to the decision point, the duration of individual reviews.

It’s also a problem to receive comments that are not substantive or material to the acquisition Strategy. It simply does not make sense to require development and review of, for example, a final Performance Work Statement and Source Selection Plan for an acquisition whose strategy is not yet approved.

We will better focus on the work ahead, more adequately spread the load, and improve our overall speed and agility. We are preparing alternative offers to our resource sponsors, which will assess the risk of manpower cuts at various levels while also identifying tasks which will not be completed as a result.

The complexity of coordinating and maturing new processes, executing multiple efforts within the network architecture in a fixed price contract structure, and aligning with our industry, operational and external partners and organizations introduces significant risk of using excessive processes as a preferred control approach by the team.

To combat complexity internally and mitigate the risk of process stasis in the new program model, standing orders have been issued to each division lead to eliminate any piece of a process that, in their judgment, does not clearly add value. We will continue to evaluate and streamline all processes over which we have control in an aggressive manner.

We are formulating specific recommendations to streamline the process. We are exploring innovative contract strategies to reduce the cost of competition and enable a smoother budget profile over time. To date we have identified some alternative strategies, which may meet these needs and which we continue to flesh out

We need to look into ways to use special contracts approaches if required to enable faster fielding of equipment and services. We must support acquisition streamlining and limit documentation to only those which are either clearly proven to provide value added to the PM or meet a statutory requirement.

Although there are some parts shortages that are causing delays and out of station rework, these are manageable and part of a typical production launch for a complex system. These inefficiencies have contributed to some cost growth, but the growth is small when compared to total contract value. Of course Readiness Matters More than cost.

We do not expect the schedule delays to impact the test events on the critical path yet, and with the contract structure, the vendor is motivated to correct the issues. Finally, parts shortages are on a path to be corrected soon so that later vehicles will be built more efficiently with few or no out of station retrofits.

Upgrades for increased survivability and reliability are in production and the fielding effort is on schedule and well below cost., but we have experienced cost growth related to underestimating prototype build cost and the complexity of meeting Information Assurance requirements. These requirements have grown more complex and challenging for our systems recently, and there is a shortage both in the PM shops and at the vendor of personnel with a solid grasp of the field.

Also, the program is challenged with respect to RDT&E funding. We have deferred some requirements, like training devices, in order to live within the adjusted budget. Though program disbursements should return to health eventually, additional RDT&E decrements or sequestration will force a significant schedule slip.

With the significant number of technical issues that have escalated over time, we struggle to support them all in a timely manner due to limited resources across their competencies. To meet acquisition office requirements as evidenced through engineering contract modification proposal inadequacies and lengthy negotiations complicated by inconsistent/non-compliant disclosures and rate structures as determined by review boards.

On the positive side, some vendors have made progress in resolving some outstanding contractual and audit non-compliance issues. There is now a more “customer focused” approach, which has improved the overall situation.

The modernization effort has been long time coming and the light is finally at the end of the tunnel. This program is progressing in an exemplary fashion and is tracking extremely well, accomplishing key critical milestones. Bottom line, this effort is proceeding very well, and we are confident we can overcome the challenges that still remain by empowering the PM to make critical decisions.

My weapons system program extension efforts are technically sound and delivering on schedule. However, I have increasing concerns in my long-term ability to sustain the reliability and accuracy of the Weapons System.

It is critical my project continues to get support from senior leadership to ensure the success of my program, I must be properly resourced. I am constantly battling for resources to offset the “loss of buying power”

Without getting the budget stability a program needs my buying power will be decimated and compromise my ability to continue to certify and maintain a capable weapon system,.

At some point, it will become impossible for my best efforts to result in continued program success unless we make reliability investments in developing tools/systems to assess combat support resource levels and ensure constant communications with warfighter.

1. Develop a unifying vision and strategy articulating the value of Reliability enterprise management to support the warfighter

2. Improve communication within and among centers so all centers are using the same warfighter requirements and assumptions to support Reliability enterprise processes

3. Stand up shop such as the Combat Support Planning, Execution, and Control office to conduct Reliability enterprise-level warfighter requirements analyses

4. Document Reliability processes in tactics, techniques, procedures and policy

5. Determine how operational demands should be developed and translated to Reliability requirements

6. Describe how Reliability assessments will be conducted and shared across functional areas

7. Create strategy for how Reliability assessment effects will be communicated with the war fighter

8. Create ability to look across functional Reliability enterprise stovepipes to identify opportunities to better balance capabilities

9. Provide insights into Reliability investments to enhance combat support capabilities and the ability to quantify how those investments impact mission capabilities

10. Invest in development of decision-support tools to aid Reliability enterprise analyses and better communicate with the war fighter.
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Top 10 Tools Utilised when Services Examine What Programs to Keep within Portfolios and What to Discard

6/20/2020

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​Site Visit Executive job will be to focus on defining requirements as precisely and realistically as possible from the start and then to experiment to see what works before committing big bucks.

There are going to be trade-offs and all this and the reporting lines may change to make sure we get the optimisation. Everybody recognises we have reached a point that we’ve got to just — it’s time to move from this industrial age system to a 21st-century-age system.”

Design Teams are a small group of individuals focused on defining, building, and testing solutions within a short time frame. A Release Train is a self-organizing, long-lived group of Teams, a team of teams, whose purpose is to plan, commit, and execute solutions together. Built around the organization’s core Value Streams, a Release Train exists solely to deliver on promised value by building beneficial solutions for the customer.

Using tools like a common Vision, Roadmap and Program Backlog, aims to complete goals within a specific period of time,.

Program Level is another key concept within design. Simply put, the Program Level is where development teams and other resources are applied to an important, ongoing development mission. Most Program Levels — such as teams, roles, and activities — revolve around a specific Release team, ensuring a constant flow of incremental, value-generating releases.

The first step is to understand and document user requirements and Constraints for system capability so acquisition process can meet requirements.

Availability/reliability parameters must be explained and guide trade-off studies of mission capability and operational support, defining baseline against which the new system will be measured.

Performance factors need to be matched up with user’s needs into clearly defined system parameters and allocate/ integrate parameters to relevant disciplines needed to realise
success.


Systems engineering attempts to optimise effectiveness and affordability as the capability is created. The systems approach makes sure the question What are the user needs and constraints? is answered before designing the answer.

The top-level programme plan for achieving required available/reliable is executed in manner to ensure requirements are achievable. Through understanding user needs and constraints, new capabilities begin to be defined.

Must establish the case for a materiel approach to resolve gaps in capability. The primary focus is to acquire quality products balancing process of satisfying user needs while improving mission capability and operational support, also adhering to scheduling constraints and justifiable acquisition costs.

During capability assessments, time and resources need to be set aside to measure and characterise current operational experience, organise metrics and supply line performance to reach conclusions about the causes of shortfalls.

It is also imperative to understand subsystem design complexity and influence on availability/reliability. Capabilities-based approach leverages the expertise of all service directorate activities defining new capabilities.

Primary focus is to ensure that joint force is properly equipped and supported to perform across disciplines to identify improvements to existing capabilities and crate new warfighting capabilities.

Process defines needed capabilities through characterisation of doctrine, organisation, training, materiel, leadership, and Labour at Job SItes. Availability/reliability levels are defined within this framework, principally in the category of materiel.

So Goal is to inform and share information among decision makers tasked with design, buy, use, and system support. Information to be shared includes user requirements, and how system will be used or potentially miss targets.

Key to any assessments is description of use/support location, constraints on what support is available for system, what information will be available to decision makers, and how that information will be verified.

Army needs to identify what might be missing, and if there is something, they will need to potentially initiate a new program within that portfolio.

In some cases, like the Future Vertical Lift portfolio, it is easier to see the path forward. And the Army is already heading toward using flight demonstrators to help define requirements for a future vertical lift aircraft.

By building and flying demonstrator aircraft, it gives the opportunity for the service to fail early and fail cheaply, and to learn from mistakes and get to a higher level of technical readiness earlier in the program.

But for other portfolios within the new modernization command, more work has to be done, in part due to the nature of the technology involved.

“The network is hard, it’s really, really hard because it’s complex because those types of capabilities or the technology is really in the commercial sector more than the military sector, and it’s moving quickly and yet you can’t just take it from industry and put in the military world because you have to make it secure, it has to be ruggedized and it has to be able to operate in certain environments, and so that is the challenge.

Making a tougher job for future command lead in charge of the network, the Army decided to curb the cornerstone capability of its tactical network, the Warfighting Information Network-Tactical, or WIN-T, system, in favor of other capabilities. The service said it needed to entirely reboot its tactical network to operate against emerging threats on the battlefield.

With all of this, you do have to understand you have to get your requirements right, and for the network … the key, or part of the key going forward, has to be to understand the architecture and to map it out so we have the plan going forward.”

“It’s like building a house — you have to have a blueprint.” Having a blueprint doesn’t necessarily mean deciding who will supply the fixtures or materials or what will be used, but it defines what is needed.

Leadership wants to see the services get away from the idea of filling capabilities with interim, gap-filler solutions that would be scrapped once a next-generation capability comes online.

Leadership does not want to make perfect to be the enemy of the better. Let’s not think as much about interim capabilities. If we made the requirements so high, if we raised the bar so high that we think we need to have an interim, maybe we need to kind of lower that bill, those requirements.

It’s not perfect but it’s better than what we have now. And then we build a system that we can scale, that we can modularize, that is kind of open architecture that we can kind of build upon.”

Congressional spending has become so unpredictable, the defense industrial base is shrinking and the weapons systems of tomorrow are not being developed today.

Defense spending cuts in recent years caused a dramatic number of defense industry suppliers to leave the market while chilling industry’s research and development activities.

“Though the defense budget had been declining in the years leading up to sequestration in FY 2013, the enactment of sequestration and budget caps marked a severe market shock that had a considerable impact on the defense industry.

The cyclical nature of department budgeting, including delays in getting new spending approved, is a problem for all but the largest vendors. With annual unsteady funding, DoD has been unable to “send demand signals to industry.”

“The reality is that the Defense Department does not exist for the purpose of taking care of the industrial base. it’s the other way around, So, what the Department of Defense has to do is to ensure, to the extent that it can while doing its mission, that there is a healthy industrial base to support it.

“In terms of keeping the industrial base healthy, our design teams and capabilities to build cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, ten-years beyond state-of-the-art programs is essential in great power competition. “And it’s been allowed atrophy too much.”

Decades ago Army introduced the M109A1 155mm turreted self-propelled howitzer (SPH), called the Paladin. An artillery piece that could keep up with mobile armored formations and survive counterbattery fire was essential to the Army’s mission of deterring high-end conventional conflict. The Paladin is currently the primary fire support system for the Army’s Armored Brigade Combat Teams (ABCTs).
.
The Paladin was not one of the U.S. Army’s iconic “Big Five” modernization programs. Nevertheless it, along with other major platforms such as the Multiple Launch Rocket System and the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle or Humvee, has defined the character of the Army’s combat capabilities for decades.

The M109 today is nothing like the system that first saw service in the Army more than fifty years ago. It has been almost continually upgraded. Improvements were made to virtually every Paladin component including the howitzer itself, fire controls, engine and drive train, armor and communications.

Currently, the howitzer is undergoing yet another major upgrade, which is more of a modernization effort. What was called the Paladin Integrated Management program and is now the M19A7 SPH and M992A3 Carrier Ammunition Tracked vehicle (CAT), is intended to provide major improvements to the system’s mobility, reliability and performance.

Both vehicles are essentially being rebuilt, using major components of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle inside a new hull. Commonality of parts between the Paladin and Bradley will improve overall sustainment in the ABCT.

In addition, the M109A7 will incorporate a state-of-the-art digital backbone, enhanced power generation system and electric gun drive and rammer. Notably, several of these new technologies were originally developed under the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) program that was part of the now-canceled Future Combat System.

The Paladin upgrade program is being conducted through a special DoD/Industry partnership splitting skilled labor as well as critical facilities, with engineering support, components and supply chain management.

,Army is looking to leverage this latest set of improvements to the Paladin as the base for another round modernization. The newest Paladin variant can support a larger caliber howitzer that will be able to send projectiles out to 70 km, nearly triple the howitzer’s current range. Even greater ranges are possible with the new artillery rounds being developed for the Army. The improved Paladin, were it also equipped with a longer-range cannon, could help meet the Army’s critical shortfall in long-range fires.

To an Army determined to change the way it pursues modernization, the history of the Paladin program is a cautionary tale. Two efforts at replacing the Paladin, the Crusader and NLOS-C, foundered due to a combination of requirements mess, technology overreach, high costs and changing international threats. Paladin remains and, when upgraded, will operate as an effective part of the ABCT for decades to come.

The Paladin represents both what is right and wrong with the Army’s approach to modernization. What is right about its approach is the ability to continually improve existing platforms and systems. This minimizes technological risk as well as the opportunity costs associated with major changes in equipment.

Through a process of incremental modernization, the Army could soon have a self-propelled howitzer that in virtually all respects is an entirely different system than the one deployed decades ago.

Add to the new platform the latest artillery projectiles, themselves the product of incremental advances, and the result is a major new military capability.

What is wrong with Army acquisition is the penchant of that same system, or at least some of its leaders, to become fixated on the goal of inventing something new, even transformational.

Sometimes this is a function of requirements in search of capabilities to justify a particular vision of future combat. In other cases, it is a reflection of the mistaken notion that technological change demands a response by the acquisition system.

Truly groundbreaking technological change is a rare event. Exploiting technological advances to create a new weapons system or military platform is even rarer. Many things we consider technological revolutions, such as the mobile phone, are the result of a series of incremental advances that are brought together over time in a new piece of hardware.

The leadership of the Army’s new Futures Command must guard against taking their organization’s title literally. They will need to draw a clear line between modernization as a leap ahead and the same outcome resulting from continual technological improvements. Which is the future? The answer is both.

Congress, the defense industry, and Army all believe the Pentagon must fundamentally change the structure and performance of its acquisition enterprise after decades of tweaks and inertia.

Numerous institutional adaptations and reorganizations have been initiated in the past, many of which have led to familiar conditions: cumbersome spans of control; complex communication and procedural structures; difficulty prioritizing competitive programs and budget requirements; decreased accountability and effectiveness; and, disconnects between futures and acquisition procurement strategies, to name a few.

For the Army those conditions materialized into “a lost decade of procurement” marked by, “reductions in modernization, procurement, and RDTE funding”; and a “wave of OSD requirements.

Recent acquisition enterprise efforts to coordinate and create a shared visualization stem from a current state assessment that “acquisition’s underlying problems are exacerbated during conflict, when warfighters are in harm’s way, so natural tendency has been to work around the system rather than fix it.

Army has determined that now is the time to fix the system, as “wartime adaptation against a peer adversary will require capability generation to be exponentially faster than it was for recent operations.

Are we in need of “incremental” or “disruptive” reform? If “disruptive” change is in the cards, the alignment of forces, sustainment, training, combat developments or modernization functions within streamlined commands is one potential course of action. However, what the Army is ready for, what the specific content of the reform will be, and its tolerance levels for disruption while heavily engaged in current operations are yet to be determined.

It is clear that any new modernization command must demonstrate value to industry, research and development unit within and external to the U.S. Army, but, even more so to the warfighters whose equipment readiness is essential to the future of the force.

The new command will be challenged to:

1. Streamline the requirements process and major weapons systems development

2. Simplify current command structure currently designed to approve requirements

3. Overcome a risk-averse acquisition culture optimized for individual and organizational outcomes within stove-piped organizations,

4. Provide a vision-to-victory or futures strategy that alleviates tensions between present requirements and future readiness

5. Improve integration of operational concepts into acquisition strategies, presently determined and developed by multiple unorganized multi-star commands.

6. Create point of contact command with ownership of futures to formulate consensus on a long-term procurement strategy

7. Overcome the usual reforms and existing R&D structure by leverage industries advanced technologies and modernization

8. Increase innovation, improve balance and contrast in approaches to R&D

9. Establish conditions for a “succeed-fast” and “fail-fast” strategy throughout the defense acquisition life cycle.

10. Establish a wartime acquisition enterprise capable of rapid adaptability to threat capabilities today and in the future.


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Top 10 Initiatives Change Working Relationship With Industry Allow for Rapid Prototyping and Expedient Fielding

6/20/2020

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[The Weapons System Program Criticism Levied in this Report Does Not Represent My Best Professional Judgement. Instead, this criticism represents the opinion of individuals Outside the Services, serving to highlight potential for future goals]

DoD is on a mission to transform the way it acquires advanced military capabilities. Each of the Military Services has stood up a special organization expressly for the purpose of shortening the cycle time associated with developing and procuring new weapons systems and promoting innovation.

The aerospace and defense industry has a long history of operating special organizations devoted to pursuing innovative solutions to challenging technical and operational problems.

The organization is already demonstrating the innovative initiatives its military customers require. DoD recognizes that the traditional acquisition process takes too long. Modernization programs typically take fifteen to twenty years to provide return.

The effort to define requirements for a new platform or piece of hardware alone can take as much as five years. Often, modernization programs have been burdened by the weight of too many requirements that overly circumscribe how a system or piece of hardware must be developed and built.

The result can be an overly complex and costly solution. In addition, the acquisition system is overly bureaucratized and risk-averse. This hampers the ability of program managers and industry to take risks in order to develop innovative solutions.

The Pentagon and the Military Services want to modernize faster and cheaper. This means reforming all parts of the acquisition process, from requirements definition and engineering development to contracting, testing and life cycle management.

Leaders expect new design processes such as digital engineering and open architectures will allow industry to develop and field a new airplane every five years.

DoD and the military have created specialized organizations to change the way acquisition is done and promote the faster development of new capabilities such as Strategic Capabilities Cross Functional Teams to oversee priority modernization efforts.

Critics often say DoD weapons systems programs can result in products being either too heavy to fly or too light to protect the troops. Many believe the military will likely in the future end up with vehicles relegated to the sidelines. DoD has mounted a defense to these criticisms with the establishment of a new, restructured Procurement Shop with ambitious Targets we list at the end of this report.

What follows in this Review is many criticisms of the DoD Acquisition process leading to problems in the fielding of key weapons system. At the end of this Review is a list of Pentagon Goals for improving what many critics have called a “Broken Process”.

Clearly, as outlined here, the current acquisition system at DoD has a history of problems, but with this set of new goals our Acquisition Executive Office may now be positioned to achieve marked success in the future.

Here are some attacks from the Critics:

Many “wonder” weapons are the ultimate bait-and-switch: We pay a premium for combat utility that too often evaporates on the battlefield. The only winners are the Pentagon weapons-buying bureaucracy and its contractors, who perpetually promise more than they can deliver.

With its continuing missile-defense dream of shooting down bullets with bullets or lasers while ignoring incoming decoys, the Pentagon is seeking to break the laws of physics. So too with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an elastic design stretched to fit the needs of the Air Force, Marines, and Navy.

Crammed with compromises to serve three masters, it isn’t optimal for any pilot. The F-35 echoes the 1960s’ failed TFX program, whose goal was to build an airplane with moveable, sweeping wings, and which the Air Force and Navy could share.

The Pentagon’s corner-cutting to try to meet the services’ conflicting range and speed requirements plus the Navy’s need for a beefed-up aircraft capable of punishing carrier landings proved too great. So only the Air Force ended up flying the TFX, which became the F-111. Because the U.S. military didn’t learn the lesson of the F-111, DoD is now burdened with the F-35, the most costly weapon system in history.

Another example are plans to build an Infantry Squad Vehicle designed to parachute onto the battlefield. The vehicle will almost surely end up facing the same fate as an earlier version the Pentagon tried to field.

Looks like we’re about to climb aboard for a similar ride, but this time it will be on the ground. The Army is pitting three companies against one another to see who can build the best truck to be pushed out of a flying helicopter and parachute to the ground, beyond the range of enemy missiles. It also needs sufficient protection for the nine-soldier squad who’ll climb into it and rush into combat.

Paratroopers still travel no faster than their boots can carry them. “The modernized vehicles will provide enhanced tactical mobility for an infantry brigade combat team to move quickly around the battlefield,” says the Army who wants to begin buying an initial batch of 650 of these Infantry Squad Vehicles soon, and ultimately buy more than 2,000.

But war can put its players into a box whose dimensions are dictated by physics. “It is unconscionable that we have gotten to the point where the assault load of an assistant machine-gunner is 170 pounds,” a Pentagon official said. “We have got to do something to reduce the combat load or we are going to be like knighted knights in armor walking around the battlefield with very little mobility.”

Beyond the problems of physics, an additional issue that could compound the program’s cost risk is procuring the prototypes and possibly follow-on production under other transaction authority designed to relax procurement rules. Its goal is to entice new and innovative companies to do business with the government. But in this case, the competitors are largely traditional contractors.

Critics say new Army vehicle has its own vulnerability. Let’s call it Achilles’ wheel: It has no armor. The truck will protect soldiers “by high mobility avoiding enemy contact.“If that proves insufficient, each soldier will rely on their “Personal Protection Equipment”—“helmet, body armor, and other accoutrements designed to protect against blast fragmentation and thermal threats

Use of “soft-skinned” vehicles in lower-threat areas has been cast into doubt. “The special operations component had done an assessment for armored vehicles, for example, and determined, a while back, that they weren’t necessary, but we immediately directed that armored vehicles be given to those teams as an option.”

For some of its ground forces, the Army wants to use existing designs “to reduce costs and the time it takes to field combat vehicles, watchdog report said. The Army’s plan echoes the same promise, ultimately unfulfilled, that the Marines made for their Growler 20 years ago.

The M1161 Growler, officially known as the Internally Transportable Vehicle [ITV], is the only military vehicle approved to fly aboard the Marines’ V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft. The Defense Department originally envisioned the Growler as a cheap vehicle that would use parts already being produced for existing military vehicles. But ultimately, much of it was built from scratch to make it light that is, armorless and small enough to be shoehorned into the V-22.

The Internally Transportable Vehicle’s cost ballooned by 120% over the original estimate and the watchdog blamed the Marines’ overly optimistic assessment of how much work would be required to fit the vehicle into a V-22, along with management that made that challenge even tougher.

“The Marine Corps underestimated the development effort required to modify the … ITV to meet size and weight limitations” for it to be transportable in a V-22, as well as the Growler’s “performance specifications for durability and reliability,” the inspector general found. “ITV subsystem design changes posed significant challenges because of minimum size, weight, and center of gravity constraints mandated by the MV-22 Osprey.” The Growler’s development, “was caught in a cycle of design, test, and redesign and test” that “caused repeated schedule delays and cost increases.”

“The vehicle is considered almost useless to the forward-deployed Marines who might use it, say some those with experience. “The vehicle has been deployed downrange and used to transportation to and from ranges, or as a daily driver on larger installations. It also has served as light security.”

Creating an acquisition system that delivers innovative products rapidly also means a different relationship between DoD and industry. In essence, DoD needs to be a better customer, one that encourages industry to take risks, limits the number of requirements it levies on developmental programs, doesn’t micromanage, and is willing to tolerate failure.

The concept behind advanced development and prototyping division is to develop new products faster by unburdening the research and development process from cumbersome, slow and largely irrelevant requirements and behaviors.

It is increasingly common for the design of a complex product to purchase half or even more of the content in the product from other sources. For example, an automotive manufacturer might buy seats from one source, brake systems from another, air conditioning from a third, and electrical systems from a fourth, and manufacture only the chassis, body, and powertrain in its own facilities.

The suppliers of major subsystems in turn purchase much of their content from still other sources. As a result, the "production line" that turns raw materials into a vehicle is a network, or "supply chain," of many different firms. Agent-based architectures are an ideal fit to such an organisational strategy.

It is as important for the engineers and technicians to think differently as it is for them to move fast. This is not traditional R&D. If we go into these programs thinking only about propulsion, for example, we all lose.
Teams have been challenged to think about the problem differently, because people can try out ideas in a way that is freeing them up and not so risk averse.”

The team’s model for rapid innovation in engines and associated equipment has shown some success. For example, the prototype for a new, more fuel efficient, low-cost 700lb-thrust engine for cruise missiles and drones was done quickly .

The idea is to iterate engine’s design, demonstrating to potential customers what results can be achieved by trading off requirements. This approach allows designers to experiment with different ways of designing and building products, exploiting new capabilities such as digital engineering and 3D manufacturing.

It also permits teams to develop multiple new propulsion systems and upgrade existing ones in the time it used to take to design and field just one.

The principles guiding efforts can be applied to the propulsion needs of the other Services if contract incentives are put into place.

"So the question is: How will installations & logistics organisations adapt to maintain the resiliency of our warfighters? What steps must we take to protect our installations & logistics chains? How can installations & logistics sustain warfighters when networks are damaged or degraded?

“Business as usual” is not an option in today’s budget environment."

“The message is clear: A process that features excessive layers, tremendous amounts of paperwork, and timeframes that do not fit the way most firms do business is off-putting to firms in the marketplace

DoD must develop the ability to be a savvy customer in the real-world marketplace, so it is able to purchase the technology and equipment it needs.

“Processes such as developing requirements, contracting, making investments, or obligating money are often driven not by a sound business case, but by arbitrary deadlines and outside pressures.”

“DoD could garner more from its funds if it functioned in a flexible system that allowed more effective resource allocation. An opportunity cost arises each time DoD makes a spending choice that could have been invested in developing other capabilities, delivering more units, or funding other critical requirements.”

“Many regulations can remove or dilute authority and accountability. Regulations that dictate contract type can deprive acquisition personnel of the discretion needed to get the best deal for DoD. Additionally, the management structure and decision-making process within DoD are too bureaucratic and encumbered by numerous layers of review.

Successive reviews do not necessarily add substantive value, but they do add time to the process and add to the number of people who can say no or influence a program, including people who do not have a stake in the outcome of the acquisition.

Because nobody holds actual authority to manage a program, there is no one to hold accountable. The fundamental reason for the continued under performance in acquisition activities is fragmentation of authority and accountability for performance."

“Defense acquisition is a human activity dependent on the judgments, considerations, interests, and decisions of people operating in the real world. Regardless of how impressive policy initiatives look on paper, or how effective the acquisition system is

in theory, the ultimate effectiveness and efficiency of defense acquisition depends on and is determined by the people who are responsible for all phases of acquisition.”

“The dynamic defense marketplace is vastly different from the defense-centric marketplace of the past in which DoD could set the rules of acquisition. To effectively benefit from and compete in the dynamic defense marketplace, DoD must understand where it fits into the current business environment and adapt to this new reality.

DoD needs to be a more sophisticated buyer, one that understands market dynamics, interests of companies—including cash flow, profit motive, and opportunity costs, as well as the broader economy."

“Systems and capabilities must be developed, deployed, and integrated into operations within the arc of the threat, not after the threat has passed or after DoD has spent billions of dollars on technologies or capabilities that already are obsolete or will be obsolete by the time they are deployed. The private sector now drives much of the technological innovation, which makes it difficult for DoD to keep pace.

1. Optimize value for all parties in both the short- and long-term

2. Exploit variability via adaptive responses to requirements as new knowledge emerges

3. Provide complete and continuous visibility and objective evidence of solution fitness

4. Provide a measured approach to investment that can vary over time and stop when sufficient value has been achieved

5. Offer the supplier near-term confidence of funding and sufficient notice when funding winds down or stops

6. Motivate all parties to build the best solution possible within agreed-to value boundaries

7. Identifying the Minimum Viable Product and additional Program Increment potential Features

8. Defining the initial fixed and variable Solution Intent and Prioritizing the initial Program Backlog for program increment Planning

9. Better predictability of estimates associated with a far smaller mimimum viable product than the full list of all requirements,, total control over the spend required for additional incremental features based on value outcomes

10. Establishing execution responsibilities Framework, including value trade-off parameters, the program increment funding commitment, initial funding levels, and other contractual terms.
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Top 10 Open Architecture Systems Designed to Share Data for Mission Critical Events on Unit Demand

6/10/2020

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To enhance fighting power of tactical forces, many complexities of modern operations must be pushed downward. AI solutions connect leaders to small unit decision making tools to deliver all data to proceed with air and surface fires strikes and order up resupply. The device will give the leader access to intelligence from all sources tactical to strategic.

Patrol Planning App, lets Marines visually map out their patrol routes, build their warning orders and search patrols from previous squads. They can display their actual patrol routes instead of trying to recall where they traveled using a two-dimensional map.

Marines on patrol can subscribe to critical information, pertinent to his location and have that information exchanged seamlessly across the enterprise to a future handheld device.

Marines are getting tactical open architecture command and control platform ready for combat. TSOA establishes a framework that enables seamless exchange of intelligence across multiple systems and networks that is being enhanced with the increased availability of data within the battlespace.

“Open architecture implies agility and flexibility” needed in combat today and in the future. “You can’t discover you’re not interoperable on game day. “Make sure it plugs and plays.”

The challenge is to provide the operator with the opportunity to be able to quickly obtain integration of his own weapons and sensor suites. This flexible plug-and-play capacity to perform missions with a wide variety of sensors will be a considerable step forward.

Modern autonomous vehicles will allow more modular sensors to be integrated according to customer needs. The ISR omni-role platform will be plug-and-play and “sensors agnostic.” As aircraft allow for constant monitoring of a target and its environment, it is necessary to capitalize on that through the modularity of sensors ideally without hampering endurance.

While the concept of operations for autonomous vehicles are still very much under development, the general idea is the vehicles could expand not only the fleet’s sensor reach by adding more nodes to provide data to commanders but also deepening the fleet’s magazines by fielding additional missile cells that could fire on remote at the direction of a manned vehicle.

Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental, better known as DIUx, is pushing forward new technology that will give the service added capability by focusing on several technology areas including autonomy, artificial intelligence and machine learning, information technology and human systems.

The unit is meant to cut through the Pentagon’s red tape and make it easier for firms in tech hubs to do business with the Marines. Officials hope the outfit will speed the acquisition of cutting-edge warfighting tools.

The warfighting lab is currently looking into autonomous systems and robotics; artificial intelligence; counter-unmanned aerial system capabilities; lasers; electronic warfare; and systems coordination, among other technologies

The lab considers size, weight and power issues “in everything they do to support a mobile, agile Marine Corps.

“We’ve always recognized that autonomous systems, whether they are in the air, on the ground or at the surface, are going to play a role in the future landscape and future warfighting environment.

The big question is how best to incorporate the technology so that it becomes a force multiplier rather than a burden. Naturally, the service wants to avoid robotic technologies without the capabilities it needs to perform specific missions.

Unlike robotics and autonomous systems, AI is an area the lab is just starting to explore. We don’t fully understand yet what AI could mean or what it will mean in the future. We do have smart people looking into it, and we do recognize it as an emerging capability that we need to take advantage of it.”

Autonomous vehicles can be equipped with an airborne detect and avoid system that includes an air-air radar and a traffic collision and avoidance system that offers a significant alternative to the traditional rule of see and avoid
.
It is now possible to deploy a multi-sensor intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance [ISR] capability thousands of miles from its home base. With the only requirement being a small team of technicians on the deployment field, there’s no longer a need to dismantle the aircraft and ship the entire system. This facilitates the availability and initial ISR capability in emergency missions.

The redundancy of the primary beyond line of sight BLOS link with a secondary satellite link operating in another frequency band ensures the continuation of the mission by permanently maintaining the piloting capabilities, even in the event of interference. Satellite data links are used to control the vehicle, operate on-board sensors, and disseminate the ISR data collected from the aircraft to the cockpit.

The disconnection of this link, although rare, reveals a true weakness, especially when the aircraft operate in a non-segregated environment or during bad weather. However, with a second satellite link, the aircraft will now remain in control of the remote pilot and will either continue its mission safely or land without issue.

Services have tested a robot kit that can turn virtually any plane into a self-piloting drone, through a program called ROBOpilot. Systems interacts with flight controls just like a human pilot, pushing all the correct buttons, flipping the switches, manipulating the yoke and throttle and watching the gages.

“At the same time, the system uses sensors, like GPS and an Inertial Measurement Unit [essentially a way for a machine to locate itself in space without GPS] for situational awareness and information gathering. A computer analyzes these details to make decisions on how to best control the flight. Once the flight is done, the kit can be pulled out and the plane reconverted to one requiring a human pilot.

TSOA strategy establishes services as the preferred means by which data producers and capability providers can make their data assets and capabilities available to ensure warfighters receive the right information, from trusted and accurate sources, when and where it is needed
.
“TSOA is a game changer for Marines on the tactical edge. “Our experience with Marine information warfare systems and our proven technical capabilities are enabling us to address our interoperability goals through our TSOA efforts.”

“The difficulty in describing TSOA is that is doesn’t create any information. It’s an enterprise service bus doing all the work in the background. “It is the back-end piece that connects many systems. It allows you to access all of this information; and you can get it all, or subscribe only to a subset or a single piece of information. It’s very customizable.”

While TSOA is the “backbone” that gives Marines the ability to discover, subscribe, shape, filter, modify and visualize data, it is the specialized applications that give a more tangible illustration of how TSOA helps Marines make timely and accurate decisions in context.

TSOA system will allow Marines to get mission-critical information by linking independent, sometimes incompatible, tactical data systems by consolidating data and eliminate reliance on multiple incompatible independent systems, allowing Marines to subscribe to collective data, provided as a service via TSOA.

It is critical to be able to work through data to effectively fight addressed by a growing requirement for integration in working with manned-unmanned platforms that must be sensors-sharers-shooters.

Marines are achieving success in combat by providing a continuous stream of reliable, command and control (C2) information through the Tactical Service Oriented Architecture (TSOA).

MAGTF C2 services and applications integrated product team (IPT) spearheads the TSOA effort with integration and configuration management, network security, test and evaluation, and training and field exercise support.

Constant interaction with Marine C2 operators throughout the development process has given the feedback software developers need to adjust and sharpen the effectiveness of the software and the architecture.

TSOA will be installed in combat operation centers and network with other centers to provide a user-friendly, common operational picture that gives Marines the most secure, efficient and reliable information available to make accurate decisions “in context” during operational missions.

To date, the TSOA initiative has focused on implementation opportunities primarily in the Ground Combat Element (GCE) via the Combat Operations Center (COC). TSOA’s Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI) is readily adaptable to the unique command and control requirements of the Logistics Combat Element (LCE) and the Aviation Combat Element (ACE).

Operational Impact

To achieve operational outcomes, Marines will adopt “best practices” focused on data access and user-centered design, delivery, and modification. Authorized users must have the ability to discover, access, shape, filter, modify, collaborate and disseminate complete, relevant information across

Data source elements within Marine operations must be transformed and made components of services that are developed and defined by units of interest across the warfighting functions..

the current stove-piped approach to provide authorized users required data. All described effects will provide authorized users access to the full data source capability within operations and enable in context decisions.

TSOA will enhance the sharing, shaping, and visualization of data to authorized users among disparate data sources relevant to Marine operations that are inherently within a Joint

Environment and center on a MAGTF in support of a Joint Task Force. TSOA will complement the Joint Force by enabling authorized users complete information to make decisions in-context.

SSC Framework Gives Marines a Tactical Edge
Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SSC) is enabling Marines’ success in combat by providing a continuous stream of reliable, command and control (C2) information through the Tactical Service Oriented Architecture (TSOA).

Team from SSC expeditionary warfare department is leading the development, testing and fielding of TSOA for the Marine Corps. SSC MAGTF C2 services and applications integrated product team (IPT) spearheads the TSOA effort with integration and configuration management, network security and accreditations, test and evaluation, and training and field exercise support.

With new emphasis on TSOA, SSC was the logical place for further development and coordination given the center’s experience providing Marine Corps information warfare solutions through the Combat Operation Center (COC), Network-on-the-Move, Joint Tactical COP Workstation (JTCW) and other programs.

Marines have already demonstrated TSOA success in Agile Bloodhound and Island Marauder, annual Office of Naval Research events that highlight science and technology efforts supporting expeditionary warfighters.
With another Island Marauder exercise , and as more command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR) programs of record become TSOA-compliant, the SSC TSOA team expects to remain very busy.

We are already starting to ramp up our interface with users. We will be doing more training. This will be changing the culture for how Marines do their day-to-day jobs.”

“It was a big win for the command that the work was sent here. “As the overarching systems integration experts for TSOA, we have our hands in everything. We are working in each functional area and doing more interface with users

1. Concept details perform results of platform design to simulate Weapon Systems and test viability of using hardware to reach perform levels

2. Defined interfaces enable variety of material solutions be incorporated [plug’n protect] in Aircraft survive suites w/o modification.

3. Open Architecture represent confluence of tech practises yielding modular, interops systems and open standards w/ published interfaces
​
4. Use distributed open system design w/ distributed processing and modularity--Introduction to the fleet comes from a single source library

5. Virtual perform provides functional benefits like load-balancing, processor utilization, storage

6. Open Architecture hardware employs virtual tech w/ potential to provide cost savings in terms of procurement, daily ops & maintenance

7. Varied technique Open Architecture approach include life-cycle risk simulation, total ownership costs& knowledge value-added measures

8. Capability interface systems process limit cost growth and develop rapid costs insertion [ARCI] & advanced processing build process [APB]

9. Value-Added metrics applied through cost compare between test platforms

10. Results can be generalized to non-military applications.
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Top 10 Open Architecture Standards Share Data on Everything from Target Coordinates to Engine Diagnostics

6/10/2020

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​Marine Warfighting Lab has developed processes that allow senior leaders to make smart decisions about the technologies they need for programs of record, the technologies they do not need and the technologies that may quickly become

obsolete. But making choices can be challenging, he says, because people are swayed by technology and the “bright, shiny new object.

The technological renaissance is providing a lot of options, and with all the technologies you could make a case for each one. But they cannot all be pursued. “The problem is that we can’t afford to buy everything so we have to make an assessment of capabilities and to make recommendations on capabilities that will have the greatest return on our investments.”

“The hardest part is trying to make sure that the people who are in love with their technologies understand what it is that they are in love with. It is difficult to convince people that, ‘Yes, it is a great capability, but is it greater than this other capability over here?’

“Everything we consider has to get a fair shake. There have been technologies that nobody liked that turned out to be pretty effective.” And at the end of the day, when the Marines are kicking in the door, those technologies could make all the difference.

“We’re really quite satisfied with what’s going on there for the Marine Corps. The service pushes for “projects that tend to be more practical, more physical. One promising program is the FVL platform.

When Future Vertical Lift systems enter Army service, new drones and high-speed helicopters won’t be the only things flying through the air. Linking the FVL aircraft will be an invisible network, transmitting data directly from one machine to the next, without the clumsy, slow-moving intermediary of human voices
over the radio or human hands on a keyboard.

This Modular Open Systems Architecture will be essential to FVL’s performance across the board, from combat to maintenance to long-term upgrades.

“Probably one of the hardest things we’re going to do is affordability. Because military systems have to serve for decades, the really big bill here isn’t procurement, it’s long-term maintenance, sustainment, and upgrades to keep the aircraft not only functional but up to date.

Replacing worn-out or obsolete components with new and better ones adds up tremendously over the years. As with other weapons system platforms, percent of our total cost of ownership is the sustainment of the fleet.”

The Army’s worked hard to control those costs with its current fleet of aircraft. But there are hard limits on how efficient you can become when different types of aircraft – and even aircraft of

the same type built at different times – use different electronics, none of which were built with ease of maintenance and upgrades in mind.

Most components don’t have built-in diagnostic chips the way a modern automobile does, for instance, so the only way to check whether they’re working is to unscrew an access hatch and look inside. If something is broken or just out of date, then swapping a single part, even something as simple as a cockpit display, may require laboriously rewriting code on several other systems that interact with it.

“In our current systems, Army Aviation has done a phenomenal job of leading the Army on condition-based maintenance. We are pretty far out there about collecting data and knowing when something is going to fail.”

Using diagnostics this way allows repair crews to intervene when needed, instead of either waiting for a problem to become obvious – which means problems become more dangerous and expensive to fix – or conducting laborious preventive maintenance just-in-case – which consumes countless man-hours of highly trained ground crews.

“However, we did that by platform, and each individual platform uses a different system to be able to do that. As we move forward, the intent is to go ahead and make sure that we have a common platform for condition-based maintenance. We think this will fundamentally change how maintenance is done… which will ultimately drive down cost.”

Those common maintenance diagnostics will be built into the Modular Open System Architecture. Rather than prescribe to contractors how to do it or let each contractor come up with their own, incompatible proprietary solution, the Army will dictate common standards and interfaces, made available to all – ie “open.” That should allow the military to replace a piece of code from one vendor with better code from another, without having to rewrite the rest of the system – this means “modular.”

“In the draft documents… we have put the hooks in there to make sure that industry knows that that is going to be a requirement. When we send out the proposals to industry, we will direct that certain things be common as far as condition-based maintenance is concerned: what they measure, how they measure it, how the ones to zeros are holding, so that the unit…can get that same data, regardless of whether they’re looking at FARA, FLRAA, or one of our enduring systems.”

The Army hopes to backfit at least parts of MOSA onto its existing helicopter fleets, which will serve for decades to come, with the FVL aircraft replacing them over time. Whenever possible, it will upgrade different types of existing aircraft in ways that make them more compatible and use more common systems. But it’s with FVL that MOSA will fully come into its own.

The Army’s determined to enforce common standards and common software in a way it never has before. The number one challenge we have with MOSA is … that discipline and management. “What allowed the enduring fleet of aircraft to wind up with different architectures because there was not a driving central body that said, ‘this is the architecture that you are going to go with.’… With MOSA, we have that.”

“It really comes down to defining that DoD standard, and defining that DoD interphase, and then … holding to it. The PEO has led the charge with the architecture control working group, meeting quarterly, with industry participating.”

Getting MOSA to work is a literal essential to the success of the mission. It won’t just transmit maintenance data, helping forestall breakdowns and prevent accidents. It will also transmit tactical data, helping manned and unmanned FVL aircraft coordinate with each other in combat.

“That system architecture has open systems, interfaces, and gateways, so we can push data” seamlessly across the force, without incompatible systems on different aircraft stopping the flow of information. “We’re refining our data formats to auto-populate nine-lines i.e. calls for urgent evacuation, calls for fires i.e. artillery and air strikes, our production,
exploitation and dissemination of intelligence.”

How soon will elements of this system become available to soldiers? It will enter service before the manned FVL aircraft do. The FVL modernization team is working with their counterparts for the Army network. They’ll field new data-sharing systems as part of the 2023 upgrade, known as Capability Set 23.

But that will just be the beginning of a multi-year effort to build Army aviation’s invisible, digital backbone.

Computations that must be spread out across the entire data set—like finding an average or doing a statistical analysis—must be split up into subjobs, spread out across all of the nodes, and then aggregated when it’s done

Here we introduce a conceptual, yet quantifiable, architecture framework by extending the notion of system modularity in its broadest sense.
Acknowledging that modularity is not a binary feature and comes in various types and levels,

the proposed framework introduces higher levels of modularity that naturally incorporate decentralized architecture on the one hand and autonomy in agents and subsystems on the other.

This makes the framework suitable for modularity decisions in Systems of Systems and for analyzing the impact of modularity on broader surroundings. The stages of modularity in the proposed framework are naturally aligned with the level of variations and uncertainty in the system and its environment, a relationship that is central to the benefits of modularity.

The conceptual framework is complemented with a decision layer that makes it suitable to be used as a computational architecture decision tool to determine the appropriate stage and level of modularity of a system, for a given profile of variations and uncertainties in its environment

The fundamental systemic driving forces and trade-offs of moving from monolithic to distributed architecture are essentially similar to those for moving from integral to modular architectures.

The spectrum, in conjunction with the decision layer, could guide system architects when selecting appropriate parameters and building a system-specific computational tool from a combination of existing tools and techniques.

Environment/Threat Simulation: The ability to create, generate, or replicate ideal, distorted, or “real-life” signals is essential in the design, testing, and operation of electronic warfare and avionics systems.

Building a threat environment involves making or recreating a lifelike radio signal as precisely as possible. This can be especially challenging, because most solutions compromise speed, bandwidth, signal fidelity, and memory.

However, next-generation arbitrary waveform generators are now coming on the market that enable much easier generation of complex signals than in the past.

To apply open standards, you begin at the chassis level, develop the common backplane interfaces, and then move toward replacing modules. Developing commonality at that level will take time, but the military customers are discussing that path in order to align to those goals.

1. New applications that need to be built quickly

2. Enterprise or business applications that need to mirror traditional network departments and processes

3. Teams with inexperienced developers who don’t understand other architectures yet

4. Applications requiring strict maintainability and testability standards

5. Asynchronous systems with asynchronous data flow

6. Individual data blocks interact with only a few of the many modules

7. Tools used by a wide variety of people

8. Clear division between basic routines and higher order rules

9. Fixed set of core routines and a dynamic set of rules that must be updated frequently

10. Development teams that are spread out, often across the globe
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Top 10 Battlespace Events to Execute Decentralised Command Decision Making based on Strategic Intent

6/10/2020

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The days are coming when a squad leader on a battlefield, far from headquarters and large supporting units, will pull out something that looks like a smartphone, open an app and push a button and something in front of his squad will explode.

That’s one piece of a large vision that is emerging from work being done by the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force.
To enhance the fighting power of tactical forces, many of the complexities of modern operations should be pushed downward.

For this to work, decisions formerly made by high-ranking individuals must be made by personnel at lower levels. Artificial intelligence offers a solution. Think of small unit apps that connect a leader to a constellation of decision-enhancement tools.

Today it takes an entire multi-service bureaucracy to deliver air and surface fires. If we are to empty the battlefield this enormous mass must depart to be replaced by a fires app that, with the engagement of a single icon, delivers all the necessary data to allow a strike to proceed in seconds rather than hours.

Other icons on a leader’s device will order up evacuation and resupply. The device will give the leader access to intelligence from all agencies from tactical to strategic.

“We used to believe that operational art drove tactical art. We’re seeing now that it’s the opposite.”

The forum is heavy on technical advances both present and future, but the way the United States and others fight will be “turned upside down” by a combination of technical and tactical.

“It’s not a technical problem, it’s an organizational and bureaucratic problem. We have the tech to do what is being described with a quadcopter purchased at Walmart. The problem is having it integrated and immediately responsive.”

The smartphone bombing app was one of a number of examples of how small units, the size of either an Army or Marine squad, will influence operational and strategic levels of warfare from the tactical level.

Much of the work being done at that lower level is drawing on lessons from special operations forces from the past 15 years or more of combat.

Their work has led to a construct in which small teams are enabled to move freely.

They do that by having missile fires, close-air support and layers of defense that include shoulder-fired weapons to take out big things like tanks and aircraft.

Marines will also add swarms of drones to create a protective bubble. That’s all to ensure that those small units are not able to be surprised.

The task force has helped prioritize funding for the close combat 100,000 – infantry, special operations, scouts and combat engineers – who do most of the fighting, but receive a fraction of the overall defense budget.

Some of the early priorities include new night-vision devices, accelerated development on a next generation rifle and machine gun and a futuristic Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, that would put night, thermal, wayfinding and targeting into one device that could also share data across the squad and up the echelons.

In augmented reality, computer-generated or real-world sensory input is placed on top of a soldier’s view of the real-world environment.

Soldiers, Marines are trying out new device that puts ‘mixed reality,’ multiple functions into warfighter’s hands

The system melds navigation, targeting, situational awareness and communications into a single device with advanced thermal and night vision.

But more recently their next phase of efforts have focused on improving recruitment, retention and upping the human performance factors that make those individuals in close combat capable of handling increasingly complex future missions and responsibilities.

Marine Leaders are starting to view the close combat forces as an “excepted” portion as that force, still part of the regular service, sees its mission prioritized to meet strategic goals.

The squad-level operators should have at their fingertips weapons systems and authorities that remove the bureaucratic layers that, for now, get in the way of rapid action and reaction on a battlefield that moves in milliseconds.

Individual soldiers and Marines carry on their backs capabilities that once consumed acres of equipment, from communications to precision strike networks.

“We’re asking units at the squad level to do what brigades or battalions did 20 years ago.”

To do that they’ll need to augment themselves with robotics, cyber and aerial dominance and “reach back” weaponry.

Marine leaders are painting a picture of a battlefield of mostly empty spaces between small units. A “checkerboard force” would see a squad spotting a weapons 100km away and be able to bring to bear systems that would attack, kill and degrade that larger unit to the point that it would have to dismount simply to survive.

Marine Corps leaders are directing commands to go faster and equip warfighters with the tools they require to fight and win in a more timely manner.

One of the biggest takeaways from the experiment was that the individual Marine is a “tremendous innovation engine.

“The creativity of our Marines and small teams gives us a significant advantage.

“The Marine that grows up with access to the education we have, when compared to the rest of the world … is a factory for good ideas.”

“We understand that warfare is inherently, despite all of the technologies, … a human endeavor. “We want to recreate the uncertainty and fear and the danger associated with that so that we can get the best picture.”

In a experimental phase, the service took an infantry battalion and established it as an experimental force. We put them in the construct of a sea-based Marine Air Ground Task Force and we reorganised them, changed some of their training, their equipment, and over 18 months we conducted a series of operations and experiments before operationally deploying them in this configuration.

We are predicting a quick migration to enemy use of unmanned ground systems, surface systems and subsurface systems.

“Envision a future where you have a patrol that is looking for an aerial system, and instead a ground system comes up or is sitting along a trail. It could be in a sleep mode and camouflaged and then activates based on vibration or voices. Then it does what it is designed to do, which could be a collector to listen to discussions and stay quiet, or it could become basically an improvised weapon.

To combat this risk, the warfighting lab is broadening its work in unmanned systems.

“Based on our experience from the counter-IED fight, we recognise that as we start to develop capabilities to counter air systems, it is only logical that the enemy will start to look at other capabilities. Our goal is to stay one step ahead and anticipate what is coming.”

New tech will allow the Marines, for example, to walk into a operational theatre and already know where the hot spots are, potentially shutting down these connections in advance and turn them back on when they leave. “It is important for that tactical unit to be able to have immediate effects as they are experiencing them.

“These experiments are crucial in sorting out useful technologies and capabilities.”

For some technologies and experiments, the service might be able to buy some systems that are ready for fielding or use what was learned through that experimentation to feed into requirements generation.

Marines are working to generate rapid requirements, then buy a few capabilities, put them in the experiment and then use that to take a concept of operations and inform requirements fed back into the process and eventually into a program of record.

Marines have opportunity for engineers to take technologies from mature experiments and put them in the hands of Marines.

“When we put it in their hands, they figure out how to use it and they come back and tell us this is how we need to use this thing, this is how we to develop the concepts of operations and the concepts of employment and the tactics, techniques and procedures to put it out there and field it.”

“It’s up to us as the headquarters to say OK, got it. We’re going to figure out how field it to you and get it to you.”

The Marine Corps is looking at ways to insert new technology into its forces earlier in order to prepare for future battles. Key to this effort is experimentation.

Marine Corps doctrine provides roadmap for combat but does not consist of procedures to be applied in specific situations, only establishes general guidance that requires judgment in application.

Success in combat requires an intuitive ability to grasp a unique battlefield situation, a creative ability to devise a practical solution, and a resolve to act. Marine Corps style of warfare requires bold leaders to provide initiative down to the lower levels.

"Leaders must demand a radical shift in their hiring and promotion practices to focus less on skills and experience, and instead look for individuals who demonstrate strength in agility, continuous learning, interpersonal communication, and proactive problem-solving skills."

Concentration of effort in time/space and speed generate momentum to add punch to Marines actions. Battle Groups stand a better chance of success by concentrating strength against an enemy weakness instead of strength against strength.

Since focus of effort represents a bid for victory, it forces leaders to concentrate decisive combat power just as it forces leaders to accept risk.
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To generate the tempo of operations required and to best deal with the uncertainty, disorder, and fluidity of combat, command must be decentralised.

Subordinates must make decisions on their own initiative, based on the understanding of the commanders intent, rather than passing information up the chain of command and waiting for the decision to be passed down.

The take home message here is that the Marine Corps does not accept lack of orders as justification for inaction.

1. Warfare by attrition seeks victory through the cumulative destruction of the enemy's material assets by superior firepower and technology.

2. Warfare by manoeuvre circumvents a problem by attacking it from a position of advantage rather than meeting it straight on.

3. Combat power is a measure of the total destructive force e.g., troop strength, manoeuvres, tempo, surprise, one can bring to an enemy at a given time.

4. Combined arms is the full integration of multiple efforts in such a way that to counteract one, the enemy must make himself more vulnerable to another.

5. Marines use assault support to quickly concentrate superior ground forces for a breakthrough.

6. The Marines use artillery and air support to support the infantry penetration and interdict enemy reinforcements.

7. To defend against the infantry attack, the enemy must make it self vulnerable and seek cover to supporting arms so the Marine infantry can manoeuvre against them

8. To block the Marine penetration, the enemy must quickly reinforce from his reserve.

9. To avoid the effects of deep air support, the enemy must stay off of the roads so they can only move slowly and cannot reinforce in time to prevent the Marine breakthrough.

10. The combined arms create a dilemma for the enemy.
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Top 10 Prototype Systems Builders Align with Customer Needs During Change Tech, Competitive Innovations

6/1/2020

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​Competitive prototyping has been highly encouraged, if not mandated, as a preferred approach to major systems acquisition in DoD. Its repeated encouragement is due in part to its description as a best practice by specially formed task forces.. In most instances, competitive prototyping is presented as a tool for stoking creative thought, for improving decision-making, and for leading to better acquisition outcomes.

In other instances, its value has been questioned. In practice, competitive prototyping has not always delivered on its promises. Part of its mixed results has been attributed to widespread confusion over the meaning of terms and how prototyping should be pursued on a competitive basis. Building off lessons learned, this report provides an overview of prototyping accompanied by a description of how competitive prototyping has and could be practiced better within DoD.

Summary

Building off lessons learned, an overview of prototyping is provided and is accompanied by suggestions for doing so better and on a competitive basis within DoD.

The debate over prototyping is not so much over whether prototyping is good but when it provides value. At Milestone C, prototyping as a pre-requisite to a low-rate initial production decision is well accepted. The large commitments of capital that accompany a production award warrant some assurance that the technology to be produced will deliver as promised. Prototyping provides that assurance. At Milestones A and B, however, prototyping has not gained much traction, especially when cheaper alternatives seem to be available. 

Paper competitions coupled with systems analysis, models and simulations, and other estimation techniques have been the desired alternative at these earlier stages of the life cycle. These methods are thought to be both cheaper and less time consuming than prototyping, and therefore more cost effective. The critics say otherwise.

Critics argue that if prototyping is good enough to support a production decision, why not use it earlier to justify a formal program start at Milestone B or a comparison of alternatives at Milestone A. Time and time again, they say, paper competitions and capability estimates have shown major systems acquisition to be plagued more by the unknown risks of systems development than the known ones. Experiences learned when developing aircraft illustrate this point: all the analysis in the world cannot reveal what one does not know. Prototyping can.

The response to these criticisms has been that, while prototyping may provide value, there is too much change early in the life cycle to make prototyping worthwhile. Changes in technology, performance objectives, and operational concepts prior to Milestone B marginalize the value of prototyping in the early stages of the life cycle. Besides, the response goes, prototyping can provide little additional knowledge when compared to other acquisition techniques without completing a detailed design. And going through detailed design prior to Milestone B is just setting oneself up to do it all over again in Engineering and Manufacturing Development. The debate, therefore, is over whether prototyping early in the life cycle can ever be cost effective.

A similar debate surrounds the use of competition. All would agree competition is good; not all would agree it is always sensible. Competition for competition’s sake has never been the goal. The goal is to get a better value. Competition may be a means to this end, but, in the defense market, to invite more competition invariably entails more costs.

When these costs exceed their expected returns, competition no longer makes sense. Like the debate over prototyping, with competition, the debate is over how competition should be approached so that it provides enough value to warrant its costs.

Recently, the debates over early prototyping and competition have converged in the context of mandates competitive prototyping for major systems acquisitions up to Milestone B and compels it to be a continued consideration throughout the life cycle. In some ways, competitive prototyping’s resurgence should be no surprise. 

The hallmark of competitive prototyping’s ascendance has always been the threat of shrinking defense budgets. With shrinking defense budgets on the horizon and sequestration looming, this is no less true today. But its prevalence as a means for effective reform is counterintuitive. Competitive prototyping not only requires more development dollars up front, it takes more time, and its success in DoD has been mixed.

The issue facing DoD is how to deal with the additional costs of competitive prototyping so that better acquisition outcomes can follow. Fortunately, the lessons from previous periods of competitive prototyping reforms provide some clues. They suggest both how prototyping can remain cost effective and how competition can be sensibly pursued. 

Reintroducing these lessons and building from them in ways applicable to today’s acquisition environment is the first step to implementing competitive prototyping reforms. It is also the first step towards obtaining better acquisition outcomes. After all, competitive prototyping does not guarantee such outcomes will follow; it only makes them possible. The goal is to make them possible using fewer dollars than before.

Prototyping Attributes
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While competitive prototyping can be more valuable than paper competitions, it can also confirm what is already known. The key to uncovering more value and making prototyping more cost effective lies in understanding what is meant by the terms “prototype” and “prototyping.” Despite decades of intermittent prototyping in DoD, settled definitions for these terms have not yet emerged. Conceptually, they are easy to comprehend if not always to explain, at which point a reference is usually handy. but no reference can explain how they relate to DoD acquisition process with its various milestones and decision points. The leap from everyday practice to the highly specialised DoD procurement process is too great.

Lack of terminology has divided the policy of competitive prototyping from its practice in ways that have frustrated realisations of its promises. Practitioners have not understood how prototyping should be approached. Policy-makers have struggled to organise principles around prototyping from which better outcomes can emerge. Settling on definitions for the terms “prototype” and “prototyping” in a way that instructs those who make policy as much as it guides those who must build one is the first step in doing so.

Prototypes Are Test Articles.

Whereas paper studies estimate a technology’s capabilities, prototyping demonstrates those capabilities through testing. Test articles are designed, constructed, and tested to demonstrate the capabilities of some technology or system. In its simplest explication, the test article is the prototype, and as a test article, it can take many forms and represent various states of maturity depending on the aims of the test .Whether the test article represents a concept, subsystem, or end item that is full scale, fully capable, or something that is much less mature, all are forms of prototypes. The process of using these test articles to demonstrate capabilities is the practice of prototyping.

Prototyping’s emphasis on technology demonstration is one reason it has been popular during periods of falling defense budgets. With fewer procurement dollars to spend, there is less appetite for risky expenditures on unproven technologies. To warrant greater investment, technology must prove itself, and more than just in operational terms It also must prove to be affordable. 

Prototyping “should allow us to fly—and know how much it will cost—before we buy” But knowing what to fly to justify what to buy has been a recurring difficulty. Conclusions are inconsitent between prototyping something that is production representative and something that is less sophisticated. Of the two, prototyping a production representative test article is the most conservative approach. 

Building production representative prototypes in advance of every major program start allows a full understanding of a technology’s costs and benefits. With a production representative approach to prototyping, risks can be contained. Fixed-priced contracts can follow. Programmatic success would be more likely. these are the goals of every prototyping and development effort as it nears production Rarely, however, is such an approach cost effective, especially on a competitive basis prior to Milestone B 

Prior to Milestone B, prototyping requires one to be selective, and being selective is where the benefits and difficulties of prototyping lie. It may not be cost effective to build a production representative prototype prior to Milestone B, but building something less sophisticated may be. Whether it is or not depends on whether one can selectively design, construct, and evaluate a prototype in ways that provide more reliable information than paper studies and analysis can provide. 

The key to remaining cost effective is to invest no more capability in the prototype than is required to further the prototype’s primary purpose The key to making prototyping more reliable than paper studies is to target those capabilities paper studies struggle to estimate accurately. Perfecting both these aspects of prototyping in a test article of limited capability is extremely difficult Doing both, however, is essential to realising a prototype’s full potential and serving its ultimate end: to generate information and guide future decisions.

Prototypes Guide Decisions.

DoD multi-phased acquisition process has many decisions points all corresponding to individual phases. At different decisions points, the degree and types of knowledge required to support a particular decision varies. But having sufficient knowledge at each point is essential to enabling better acquisition outcomes Where insufficient knowledge exists, resources are committed when not enough about the technology is known. 

Technical risk is underestimated; cost increases and schedule slips follow This has been the downside of basing decisions solely on paper studies. They tend to underestimate what is not already known. 

Prototyping enables better acquisition outcomes by improving the reliability of available information. Prototyping injects an early dose of realism into the assumptions and conclusions at the core of previous studies and analysis, thereby making them more useful. Realism comes through demonstrated capabilities. As more capabilities are demonstrated, more becomes known, and the more justification there is for the decisions made But the more capabilities are added, the more costs will be incurred, and the more closely one must evaluate whether the information being provided is worth the extra costs. 

There is a line where prototyping’s costs begin to exceed its returns. For prototyping to be a productive exercise, prototyping must keep on the positive side of the line. In practice, this requires prototyping with a particular end in mind, investing only in activities that support this end, and then using the information that results to chart a better course.

Charting a better course through the early stages of the acquisition life cycle does not require all the capabilities of a final system to be embedded in a prototype. A production representative prototype at Milestone B is not only overkill, it resembles a waste prototype need have no more capability than is necessary to support the next series of decisions Ensuring the prototypes are more valuable than paper studies, though, requires that certain capabilities be targeted. 

Prototypes should target the areas where paper studies are most weak: areas of high technical risk that are essential to system success. This targeting is essential to uncovering the unknowns that plague acquisition programs based on paper and to making prototyping worthwhile. It is also essential to reducing risk in advance of the next phase and positioning an acquisition program to capture efficiencies later on These all make prototyping more cost effective and more desirable than limiting oneself to paper alone. 

During the Advanced Tactical Fighter’s prototype phase, a number of fixes for the YF-22 prototype were identified early and incorporated at lower cost as a part of the next phase. The Navy’s A-12 program took a different approach; its early system design was based almost entirely on paper. As Full Scale Development ramped up—which is today’s equivalent to Engineering and Manufacturing Development—a number of technical problems emerged that engulfed all hopes of successfully implementing the paper design.
 
To a certain degree, the Advanced Tactical Fighter program encountered comparable problems, but not all were technical ones. Problems with funding, work sharing among contractors, and an unstable industrial base hindered efforts to capitalise on promised efficiencies Thus, while the Advanced Tactical Fighter program enjoyed a successful prototype phase, it shows how even a strong start can be overwhelmed by other issues down the road Prototyping may enable better acquisition outcomes, but it does not guarantee they will follow.

The goal with prototyping is to make better outcomes possible, and demonstrating areas of high technical risk is essential to reaching this goal. Demonstrating areas of high technical risk is also essential to making prototyping more cost effective. When areas of high technical risk are demonstrated through prototyping, it presents an opportunity to address problems early, when rates of expenditures are lower, and without risking the success of the next phase.

In development, problems always emerge, and when development is based solely on untested analysis and estimates of a design, problems tend to emerge later in development when expenditure rates are higher. Prototyped programs encounter similar problems, but problems tend to be identified earlier and can be fixed more cheaply, as in the case of the YF-22. 

Capturing this efficiency, an example of cost avoidance, bolsters prototyping’s cost effectiveness. Capturing enough of them so that the extra development dollars invested in prototyping can be recouped later is what makes prototyping more worthwhile Sometimes these efficiencies result in reduced cost; most of the time they result in reduced risk.

The Air Force’s Close Air-Attack-Support program, the program that led to the highly successful A-10 aircraft, provides an example of prototyping’s ability to reduce risk and avoid costs. During flight test, the designers of one prototype identified a flaw in wing design while the designers of the other prototype realized the benefits of one critical technology were not worth its costs Fixes were identified and adjustments made so that moving into the next phase, risks for both designs were reduced in ways that also avoided costs. In the testing of both designs, their prototypes served as risk reduction tools.

When areas of high technical risk are not addressed through prototyping, it is not likely to reduce risk or to result in much gain. During early development of the Army’s Anti-Armor Submunition for example, prototypes were constructed and tested with the highest technical risk components excluded from the design . When moving into the next phase, these components became the major risk areas. Without demonstrating those areas of high technical risk that were essential to system success, the prototype’s ability to reduce risk was marginalised. As an acquisition strategy, prototyping did not provide much value.

For any given prototype used within DoD acquisition life cycle, the areas of highest technical risk appropriate for demonstration should vary. A prototype need only provide enough sophistication to address those risks that are most relevant to the next series of decisions These risks tend to vary by phase of the acquisition life cycle. Early in the life cycle, areas of high technical risk relate to technology development. As one nears Milestone B and into Engineering and Manufacturing Development, risks associated with systems development—such as risk in the areas of integration, manufacturability, producibility, and operational suitability—come to the forefront so a prototype’s maturation should vary depending on where it falls within these phases.

So as a matter of acquisition practice is that in terms of reducing risk through technology demonstration, all prototypes are not created equal. It also means that not all risks are suitable for reduction through early prototyping. Some risks, like those appearing later in the life cycle, are just incapable of being reduced without a prototype resembling the final design.

Regardless of the risks that may or may not be reduced in a particular prototype, not to be lost is the fact that all prototypes produce information. This information can and should be used to guide a full range of decision-making, from those occurring in the context of a specific acquisition to those on which the acquisition is based.

For instance, in the acquisition community, prototyping can assist in determining whether the benefits of a new technology outweigh its risks, and thus warrant further investment Prototyping can also be useful for evaluating the merits of a particular design approach, or in the science and technology community to guide the transition of technology outside of the laboratory Prototypes can also be used in the requirements community to evaluate operational concepts and needs When prototyping, the information provided is valuable. All should use it.

Prototyping Leads to Change

The ability for a wide community of users to capitalise on the knowledge prototyping provides is another benefit of prototyping, but it does not always result in efficiency. In the course of acquisition decision-making, some degree of change is expected to result from prototyping. 

Indeed, change is what prototyping is all about. When acquisition decisions are based solely on paper studies, one would expect that change would be equally inevitable. It is. The difference is that with paper studies, the need for change is not recognised until greater capital investments have been made and major funding committed. At that point, it becomes more costly to undo what has been done.

Prototyping allows resources to be committed incrementally until the merits of a technology are better understood. When the merits are not there or are simply not worth the costs, prototyping gives reason to change course In this way, by allowing for change, prototyping provides a hedge against uncertainty Sometimes the uncertainty lies in a technology’s maturity. Sometimes the uncertainty lies in something more fundamental, such as an operational concept, requirement, or threat. In each case, prototyping provides an opportunity to change as more that was uncertain becomes known.

But in providing the opportunity to change, prototyping has a weakness. Too much change marginalises the value of prototyping, making it no more useful than the cheaper, less reliable paper studies it supplants. The more a prototype resembles a system’s final configuration, the less change it can tolerate and still provide the expected returns. 
When the prototype and final configuration item closely resemble each other, minor changes can be accommodated. Major changes, such as those associated with an operational concept or a fundamental approach, cannot 

The experiences encountered on the Air Force’s strategic airlift C-X program underscore this point: too much change in operational concept can marginalize the value of prototyping. The predecessor to the C-X program was the Air Force’s Advanced Medium Short Landing and Take-Off Transport program. The AMST program constructed and tested two full-scale representations of aircraft that emphasized tactical airlift. 

Over time, however, the Air Force saw strategic airlift as more important and cancelled the AMST program in favor of the strategic-oriented C-X. The C-X program ultimately led to the development of the C-17 Globemaster III cargo aircraft, but the fundamental change in the operational concept between the two program marginalized the value of the full-scale AMST prototypes The expected benefits of prototyping never emerged. The C-17, for all its low risk technology and preceding AMST prototype phase, still encountered significant challenges going forward .

The Air Force’s first generation Advanced-Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile “AMRAAM” program provides another example of too much change, while at the same time illustrating the perils of too little. In its first generation, AMRAAM was to provide a capability similar to another air-to-air missile of the day, just with shorter range and in a smaller package. To meet the desired form factor, the prototypes used solid-state electronics instead of the conventional tube technology found in its predecessor. The technology could not perform, and when entering Full Scale Development, the design reverted to using the already proven tube technology. 

When making the transition, program personnel relied on assumptions that said it could still meet the desired date for initial operational capability without acknowledging the significant step back they were making. AMRAAM essentially started over, and used paper studies to support its optimistic assumptions. Like the C-X program, significant delays and cost overruns ensued. Requirements should have been changed to reflect the new start.

So they were not, and difficulties followed. while prototyping allows and even encourages some amount of changes to be made, a limit must be imposed if prototyping investments are to be preserved There is no bright line rule here. Rather, the scope of allowable change appears to vary in inverse proportion to the scale and sophistication of the prototypes. When the change is significant and the prototypes relatively mature, then proceeding without a new prototype phase could be no more different than starting off with a paper design .

This is one reason the XV-15 tiltrotor prototype was not an effective precursor to the MV-22 Osprey. Though the technology’s feasibility had been demonstrated, its ability to meet an operational need was not, especially the advanced operational needs of the Marine Corps. Building the MV-22 Osprey on the basis of the XV-15 prototype was little more than starting from a paper design.

With prototyping, change may be expected, change may even be encouraged, but not all changes can be accommodated. The amount of allowable change has to be limited to ensure that the prototypes, as a tool for enabling better acquisition outcomes, survive the decision-making process.

1. Prioritise tech prototypes by industry partner more closely with Pentagon to share costs
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2. Compare and contrast tech for identifying deployment constraints and develop index for scenario selections and details of return on ops

3. Recommend deployment for ops success and implement given evaluation surround scenario outcomes and distinguish weighting scheme indices/biases

4. Significant questions at Pentagon about defense market size; is issue of strategy and not just acquisition process improvement

5. One of big questions at Pentagon is how to generate unique military advantage from tech widely available on commercial market

6. Negotiate future contracts based on output costs/price risk; benchmarks align demand with supply capacity

7. Defense benchmark repository to find pricing assumptions at odds w/ like projects and  embed tough targets into price

8.Pentagon and Congress working to rewrite statutes that are keeping staff busy checking off boxes instead of working on new tech.

9 Pentagon working with Congress to rewrite outdated acquisition rules and remove burdens from overworked programme directors

10. Pentagon acquisition structure charging in several direction at once, pushing initiatives aimed at how think about revamp tech
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Top 10 Prototype Design Principles Bring Improvements in Time to Market, Quality and Productivity

6/1/2020

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​Prototype Breakdown Structure provides basis for communication in all phases of acquisition process. Serves as common link unifies planning, scheduling, cost estimating, budgeting, contracting, configuration control & performance reporting disciplines. Consistent communications permits DoD to evaluate progress in terms of contract performance.

“Prototype” and “Prototyping” Defined

A test article used for gathering knowledge to guide decision-makers who instigate change—these are the primary attributes of a prototype. Couple them with the general guidelines provided above and the following workable definitions for the terms “prototype” and “prototyping” emerge:

A “prototype” is a test article designed to demonstrate areas of high technical risk that are essential to system success. A prototype need not be a full system, but, in scope and scale, it is tailored to accommodate series of decisions, and as such, can represent a concept, subsystem, or end item according to the decisions to be made. Rather than reflect the final design, prototypes are built with the expectation that, as decisions are made, change will follow.

“Prototyping” is the practice of testing prototypes, of appropriate scope and scale, for the purpose of obtaining knowledge about some requirement, capability, or design approach. The knowledge obtained informs a decision-making process the output of which results in some degree of change. The degree of allowable change is bounded, in inverse proportion, by the scope and scale of the prototype.

These definitions have been refined in different ways to emphasise various aspects of prototyping that, in the multi-faceted decision-making process of today’s acquisition space tend to be missed. Also emphasised are aspects of prototyping that preserve it as a cost-effective alternative to cheaper, less reliable acquisition methods.

Unlike other definitions, these definitions do not exclude production representative prototypes. Rather, they embrace them with the caveat that, with prototypes of a production representative caliber, the scope of allowable change is much less, the range of available decisions more narrow, than for less sophisticated prototypes appearing earlier in the life cycle. Among such prototypes are “demonstrator prototypes” and “advanced development prototypes,” both of which appear between Milestones A and B.

For practitioners charged with prototyping in advance of Milestone B, the distinctions between these two types of prototypes have been confounding Both are properly considered prototypes, but each resides on different sides of the development divide. Technology demonstrators are more closely associated with technology development Advanced development prototypes are more closely associated with systems development. 

On visual inspection, their differences are not intuitively obvious. But the latter is much more sophisticated and better suited to informing Milestone B. The former is much less so, but is also much cheaper to design and build. Getting the latter and not the former requires a great deal of judgment. Better policies about the two would also provide a great deal of help, which is part of the reason these definitions and their refinements are reintroduced here.

Their aim is to provide practitioners a rudimentary approach to prototyping so that it remains a viable option to cheaper alternatives. They also provide a baseline upon which more thorough policies can follow. More thorough policies are needed if better acquisition outcomes are to follow. Having working definitions is just a first step in that direction.

Competitive Prototyping and its Dilemmas

When compared to paper studies, prototyping presents an early dilemma: it takes more time and it costs more money, at least in the short term. So prototyping is justified only to the degree it allows for better materiel solutions or future savings. The objective is to spend more in development so that better systems can be fielded more quickly and for less overall cost In practice, prototyping should be a leveraged investment. The dilemma is to prototype in ways that provide a positive return.

When prototypes are evaluated on a competitive basis, the early dilemma of prototyping is exacerbated. Rather than fund one prototyping effort, DoD must fund two or more. Added to the tough decision of determining what to prototype are the tougher decisions of determining how competition will be pursued and the resulting prototypes evaluated. In most cases, the evaluation will support a future down-select decision, but until complete, the funding and management of multiple contractors puts incredible pressure on the procurement budget. Rarely does the addition of a contractor team come with a proportional increase in dollars.

Consequently, for competitive prototyping to be a leveraged investment, certain trade-offs are necessary. Development dollars must be allocated to support the right mix of activities and appropriately controlled so that a positive return might result. Competition, meanwhile, must be harnessed in a way that allows better performing systems to emerge at lower costs. In competitive prototyping, decisions are no longer limited to just those associated with the prototype. With competition, there are additional challenges.

Dealing with Budgetary Pressures

If prototyping is more costly at the front end, then prototyping on a competitive basis is worse. Not only must multiple prototypes be designed and tested as part of a competition, but with competition, the prototypes are usually more advanced .When resources are in scarce supply, this additional demand creates incredible pressure on the research and development budget. It also creates incredible risk for industry in ways that undermine the value of prototyping and hinder competition. The challenge is to find ways to channel these budgetary pressures effectively, not only for the success of the prototypes, but also for the success of DoD.

To channel budgetary pressures effectively requires dealing with risk effectively by allocating resources to what matters most. As Milestone B nears, this means devoting more resources to developing a military system and less to developing technology .
Historically, the aggressive performance goals of military systems have frustrated attempts to allocate resources this way. 

To meet performance objectives, immature technology is embraced on the hope that it can be matured at the same time a system is developed . Rare is the program that can successfully develop a system and mature technology at the same time Some plans feature more mature technology at Milestone B. Using more mature technology frees resources for purposes of systems development, which is no small feat when the system is for military use, even when the technology is relatively mature.

Dealing with risk effectively requires making room for more mature technology. In practice this means introducing flexibility in performance objectives, or setting more modest ones, so that the risk profile will align with available funding. Flexibility creates an outlet by which the trade-offs can be made to release some of the budgetary pressure. It also obviates less desirable means by which the pressure can be released: through contributions from contractor independent research.

When competition is introduced to prototyping, tapping contractor independent research and development budgets is incredibly enticing. By tapping these funds, the total budget for prototyping can be increased, more risk can be accommodated, and more performance can be chased. When compared to competitively prototyped programs where the performance goals were much more modest, the difference in total costs is striking. For the Close-Air Support and Lightweight Fighter prototypes, the total budget for prototyping was about five orders of magnitude less.

Competitive prototyping’s ability to absorb large amounts of private capital is not unique to aircraft procurements It is a by-product of competition. It is not irrational for contractors to take a considerable amount of financial risk in development in hopes of winning a production award. Development is not thought of as a profitable venture in military procurement; production is.

So there is an incentive for contractors to take large financial risks in development to win the more lucrative production contract likely to follow. For those in DoD always on the search for better performance, there is an equal incentive to let them do so.

Independent research and development budgets are the primary resource a contractor has for improving its competitive posture in a prototyping phase When that is not enough, pooling resources through teaming, such as occurred in the Advanced Tactical Fighter program, is another means for responding to a prototype’s aggressive needs . 

Over the short term, teaming and collaboration among development teams can be a good thing It can spur innovation and increase the flow of ideas. But when few can afford to compete and when failing to win the competition threatens the viability of the industrial base, neither DoD nor industry’s interests are well served controlling these effects is a part of competitive prototyping.

This is not to say contractors should not share in the cost of a prototype’s development, nor is it to say prototyping is bad for industry. Independent research and development, meanwhile, is a valuable tool for expanding the capabilities of a military system. But the pressures of competition, the inescapable lure of a multi-billion dollar defense market, and the combination of aggressive performance goals, immature technology, and inadequate funding, can create a vortex for private capital from which some competitors may never emerge. It may also create an environment that some competitors purposely avoid, all of which is counterproductive to preserving the industrial base and future chances of competition.

At the same time, when too much private capital contributes to the prototype’s development, the prototype’s value as a tool for reducing risk and providing better information is limited At the extreme end, when private funding is wholly responsible for a prototype, the resulting test article has been described as a tool best suited for marketing, not uncovering risks.

DoD procurements do not operate at this extreme. But at the extreme lies the risk of what may happen when a prototyping effort is inadequately funded and controlled. For all its success, the Navy’s Joint Standoff Weapon “JSOW” program encountered this risk as a result of its competitive prototyping effort For JSOW, much of the prototyping was done outside of the contract and on the contractors’ dime. The result: much of the technical risk was carried into Engineering and Manufacturing Development.
 
To counter these effects, DoD should absorb most of the cost pressures by funding the majority of the competitive prototyping effort. This only makes sense given that the purpose of the prototypes is to inform DoD process of decision-making. After all, the process is a treacherous one. Requirements change. Programs are cancelled. Funds are put on hold. Delays follow. All these things are likely outcomes in major systems acquisition. When they occur, they limit the ability of prototyping investments to provide a positive return. They also are all traceable to DoD If the DoD is responsible for marginalising a prototyping investment, then it should bear the costs for doing so.

This introduces discipline to the decision-making process and makes it more likely resources will be allocated in ways that provide the best return. With only a limited supply of resources, DoD can decide how best to align the risk profile to match the budget. Introducing flexibility in performance requirements so trade-offs can be made is one way of doing this. 

Adopting an austere development environment that focuses on the objectives of the prototyping phase is another Austerity controls costs and allows resources to be allocated to the most important activities, such as those that complement the practice of prototyping .
Traditional system models and simulations, for example, are complementary to prototyping because they extend the range of knowledge prototyping provides .

In addition to allocating resources effectively, if DoD is to get a positive return on its prototyping investments, its financial commitment cannot be open-ended. There must be a sensible cap placed on the costs of a prototyping phase to preserve the promise of some expected return. To make limits meaningful, they have been accompanied by suggestions to contract for prototypes on a fixed price basis.

Contracting for competing prototypes on a fixed price basis without absorbing a large amount of private capital counsels for contracting on a best efforts basis. Reining in production expectations is also important. Some have suggested that when competitive prototyping, the future should be wholly in doubt. No production run should be promised or expected It may also be best to limit how much private capital can be contributed to the prototyping phase. All these steps limit how much private capital can shape the prototypes’ baseline and obscure the bottom line.

These are all ways in which resources might be effectively allocated in a competitive prototyping so that the prototype’s status as a risk reduction tool can be preserved. Also preserved is the likelihood of a capturing a positive return on prototyping investments without distorting capital allocations in the industrial base. When excess commitments of private capital are averted, more productive allocations can be made across the industrial base This in turn preserves the competitive landscape of the military arms market, and, over the long term, this is a net benefit for DoD After all, competition may offer plenty of value, but it relies on having enough players to take the field.

Approaching Competition

With DoD bearing most of the cost pressures for competitive prototyping, other temptations exist besides the allure of private capital. Competition may be a means by which better performing systems can be obtained at lower cost, but competition adds its own costs. In competitive prototyping, the costs come in the form of having to build two or more prototypes instead of one. The temptation is to dispense with competition on the grounds that its benefits will not outweigh its costs. Then, the extra resources competition will require can be redirected to other priorities, such as attaining better performance goals. The challenge is to approach competition creatively so competitive pressures can yield better results. This requires creativity in how objectives are framed, how the benefits of competition are tallied, and how competition is pursued.

On DoD acquisition ledger, benefits are usually tallied in terms of objectives for performance, cost, schedule, and risk When these objectives are defined at the system level, this can mean competition will be pursued likewise. In this approach, the prototypes are full-scale, but not necessarily fully capable, representations of the final system design. The Air Force’s Close Air-Attack-Support, Lightweight Fighter, and Advanced Tactical Fighter programs are all examples of the full-scale competitive prototyping approach. In each case, objectives for the prototypes were defined at the system level, and then evaluated on that basis in a competitive fly-off.

How objectives for a competitive prototyping effort are defined has a large impact on competitive prototyping’s costs. How objectives are defined determines how they will be evaluated, and how they will be evaluated determines how competition will be pursued. When objectives are defined at the system level, they can be particularly costly to address as part of a competition, especially when they are very specific. 

Evaluating system-level objectives related to maintenance, operating, and supportability costs, for example, requires prototypes that closely approximate the final design. The Army took this approach in its competition for the Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System, and as a result, had to field two production representative prototypes to support the competition This required a considerable financial commitment and limited the ability to realise efficiencies over the course of development. Instead, the Army had to realise efficiencies over a much longer term. In the case of the Utility Tactical Transport Aircraft System, it was the entire life cycle.

Tallying the benefits of competition over the long term is probably the best approach, especially for systems likely to be in the field for several decades. But with smaller development budgets, the resources necessary to evaluate production representative designs as part of a competitive effort are not likely to be there. Instead, competition must be approached in a different way, such as at a lower scale or with prototypes having fewer capabilities. What this means is defining system-level objectives with much less specificity, or reducing those objectives to something that can be competed at a lower scale, such as a subsystem.

When system-level objectives can be reduced to terms of subsystem performance, pursuing competition will be cheaper. At the same time, being able to capture system-level returns at lower costs will likely make competition more attractive. Development of the AIM-54 Phoenix missile is one example where the system-level performance largely hinged on a subsystem level competition Rather than devote resources to a full system competition, they were targeted at the subsystem that mattered most. Systems like aircraft have also been highlighted as systems where, better performance at the subsystem level can lead to outsized, system-level returns. For this reason, competition at the subsystem level has been highly encouraged.

One of the best-documented examples of competitive prototyping at the subsystem level is the cannon competition held during the Air Force’s Close-Air-Attack-Support program. Besides the competition between airframes, the Close-Air Attack-Support program pursued two other competitions to attain its life-cycle cost and performance goals
The first competition was for the cannon. The second competition was for the ammunition. The Air Force managed the first. In the second, the Air Force worked through the winning cannon contractor as a surrogate. For the aircraft that later became the A-10, the gun system was critical to providing the desired operational capability. But given the cannon’s high rate of fire, cost objectives were placed on the ammunition so that the capability would remain affordable.
 
To meet these cost objectives, the Air Force directed that a competition be held at the subcontractor level for ammunition. Additional requirements directed to how competition was to be pursued and the results evaluated were also levied. The result: savings that could be garnered over the life cycle in the form of an eighty percent reduction in unit cost for ammunition.

Successfully pursuing competition at the subcontractor level requires DoD to intervene in a relationship it would often leave alone. To meet DoD needs, additional requirements related to managing a subcontractor must be levied on the prime The prime contractor must be informed of DoD requirements, including source selection criteria, to ensure DoD priorities are what shape the competition. It is also not far-fetched to condition any down-select decision on DoD pre-approval.

Implementing these additional controls will undoubtedly lead to more development costs, but not implementing them may undermine the objectives of having a competition between subcontractors. In the case of the Close-Air-Attack-Support program, directing the prime was surely more expensive, but the gains it reaped have been garnered over the long term.

Framing objectives in non-system specific terms, such as in terms of capability needs rather than materiel needs, is another way let competition work, and at lower costs. The idea behind this approach to competition is that, by allowing competition to work on a wider scale without being confined to a subset of materiel solutions, it will reap greater returns.

Putting It All Together

If the purpose of competition is to obtain better performing systems at lower cost—which is usually referred to as obtaining the best value—then allowing the best value to be found is just as important as letting competition in. Getting right mix of performance and price has been described as the key to securing a technological advantage Surely performance is one aspect of a technological advantage, but so is price. The more systems that can be fielded for a given sum the greater the force multiplier effect. When procuring military systems, the goal is often to find the best mix of the two This is no less true when competitively prototyping. Competition merely postures DoD to make a better choice. The challenge is to structure the competition so the best value shines through.

Competitive prototyping presents DoD with a choice to continue funding one or more of multiple designs Through prototype demonstrations, information about each design is gathered and used to determine whether development will proceed, and if so, which contractor is best situated to pursue it. At Milestone B, the information should reflect that the risks and benefits of a particular design warrant greater financial commitments in Engineering and Manufacturing Development If the benefits outweigh the risks, then the prototypes should further demonstrate which design provides the best value.

Unlike other procurement approaches, though, competitive prototyping does not rely so much on DoD defining the best value as it does allowing competing contractors to find it on their own. Knowing what DoD considers most important in a final design is important, but giving contractors the freedom to experiment within a range of acceptable criteria facilitates better technological solutions at lower cost. Flexibility allows for bolder technological solutions to be tried and tested without renegotiating the contract, and therefore allows more risks and design flaws to be addressed early.

Competition, meanwhile, stokes innovative thought and encourages aggressive design solutions in direct response to identified needs The requirement to prototype allows all this to occur without sacrificing credibility Through competitive prototyping, better technological solutions should emerge based on performance, not promises, and when they do, the results can be surprising.

The outcomes of the Air Force’s Lightweight Fighter competition and the Army’s Advanced Attack Helicopter show how this can be true. The superior handling of the YF-16 prototype in the Lightweight Fighter competition was one reason it was preferred For the Army, the superior handling and simpler design of the YAH-64 prototype is what caused it to prevail In both, operational suitability in the form of airframe handling was a primary discriminator. Airframe handling is difficult to evaluate on paper in advance of design, but it is particularly important to determining an aircraft’s operational suitability. In the cases of the Lightweight Fighter and the Advanced Attack Helicopter programs, the superior operational suitability of the winning designs seemed to carry the day. For the YAH-64 prototype, these results were surprising. All analysis up to the point of flight test suggested its competitor would win.

Allowing contractors the freedom to explore a mix of technological approaches has a second benefit besides providing for more innovative thought: it allows DoD to know how much capability it can afford to buy When approached in this way, competitive prototyping can inform requirements and avert an improvident pursuit for a capability that is just not there. Even when the capability is there, competitive prototyping can show that a cost effective one may be still another generation of prototypes away.

So prototyping uncovers all kinds of valuable information When judging them as part of a competition, all things should be considered, not just performance or cost To make the prototypes more insightful than paper studies, particular attention should be paid to those things that are difficult to capture in advance and on paper, such as operational suitability Also important is past performance.  Competitive prototyping can reveal which contractor is more likely to better perform in the next phase In terms of past performance, no gauge is likely to be more reliable than the recent experiences garnered through prototyping.

All the information prototyping provides can and should be used to choose between competing designs. Competition, meanwhile, should be leveraged to spur innovation and presentation of a best solution. The challenge is to put all these things together so the quest for a better solution will be worth the extra costs.

One challenge facing DoD will be to adjust the paradigm by which it approaches prototyping’s results. Sometimes the process of prototyping, whether it is competitive or not, suggests that the benefits of a particular technology are not worth the costs. In such cases, the best decision is probably not to go forward with large commitments of capital. Some may consider such a result to be a prototyping failure. but It is in fact a prototyping success.

Prototyping identifies problems prior to a full commitment of capital when it becomes harder to view a program as anything but “too big to fail” It is better to direct resources to technologies that can get to the war fighter cheaper and more quickly than it is to continue to invest in technologies that have promise but no near term return. Indeed, this is the primary reason one prototypes.

A final challenge is in establishing better prototyping guidelines. These guidelines will need to be more specific than those presented here. They will also have to account for the differences in prototypes among various military systems. Not all systems can be cost effectively prototyped at the full system level. The non-recurring expenses associated with systems like satellites and aircraft carriers are too large to ever be recouped later, and as such, they are best prototyped at something less than full-scale.

Aircraft and munitions, on the other hand, are best prototyped at higher levels of integration. To make competitive prototyping cost effective, there is a balance that has to be struck in terms of cost and capabilities that enables better decisions The balance will vary by system and better guidelines are needed for finding where the balances lie.

Similarly, there are points where prototyping on a competitive basis, as well as prototyping itself, may no longer make sense. To confirm through prototyping what is already known may be reassuring but is not likely a productive investment of capital. To continue to compete when one solution far exceeds the rest is not likely to result in much gain After all, pursuing competition for competition’s sake is not the goal the goal is better value.



1. Take a value view: Delivering the best value and quality in the sustainably shortest lead time requires a fundamental understanding of the economics of the system builder’s mission.

2. Apply systems thinking: In design framework, systems thinking is applied to the organization that builds the system, as well as the system under development, and further, how that system operates in its end user environment.

3. Assume variability; preserve options: design systems developers maintain multiple requirements and design options for a longer period in the development cycle. 

4. Empirical data is then used to narrow focus, resulting in a design that creates better economic outcomes.

5. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles: Increments provide the opportunity for fast customer feedback and risk mitigation, and also serve as minimum viable solutions or prototypes for market testing and validation.

6. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems: In design development, each integration point provides an objective milestone to evaluate the solution, frequently and throughout the development life cycle. This objective evaluation assures that a continuing investment will produce a commensurate return.

7. Visualize and limit batch sizes, and manage queue lengths: Three primary keys to implementing flow are to: 1) Visualize and limit the amount of work-in-process so as to limit demand to actual capacity, 2) Reduce the batch sizes of work items to facilitate reliable flow though the system, and 3) Manage queue lengths so as to reduce the wait times for new capabilities.

8. Apply cadence, synchronize with cross-domain planning: Cadence transforms unpredictable events into predictable ones, and provides a rhythm for development. Synchronization causes multiple perspectives to be understood, resolved and integrated at the same time.

9. . Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers: Providing autonomy, mission and purpose, and minimizing constraints, leads to higher levels of employee engagement, and results in better outcomes for customers and the enterprise.

10. Decentralise decision-making: Decentralized decision-making reduces delays, improves product development flow and enables faster feedback and more innovative solutions. However, some decisions are strategic, global in nature, and have economies of scale sufficient enough to warrant centralized decision-making.



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Top 10 Prototype Examples Workshop MakesĀ  Design Value Changes Performed Early in Process

6/1/2020

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​More competition in terms of capability needs and during the early stages of the acquisition process will have a greater effect on acquisition outcomes Rather than have industry respond with competing proposals in response to a predetermined materiel need, panels advocated for competing materiel solutions in response to a capability need.

In today’s acquisition practice, this means competition between various materiel solutions prior to Milestone A. Prototyping at this early stage in development takes the form of conceptual prototypes, which are breadboard designs of individual components and subsystems coupled with estimates of system performance provided by traditional modeling, simulation techniques.

Conceptual prototypes provide only basic approximations of system performance and cost, but enough insight to challenge assumptions and open the door for more innovation. They are also less costly to pursue than other types of prototypes, and, considering their timing, provide benefits that can be exploited over a much longer term. Others have picked on this theme of non-system specific prototyping as a means to innovate and have taken it in another direction: technology transition. 

In terms of budget categories, innovation has been found most likely to reside at the applied research and advanced technology development budget categories Technologies that are prototyped at this stage of development are not ready for operational use, but they can be demonstrated and assessed for operational utility.

More prototyping at these early stages of development has been proposed as a means for focusing research, bridging the worlds of technology development and systems development, and expanding operational performance at lower cost prototypes that appear in these budget categories are known as Advanced Technology Demonstrators, and they have become a valuable tool for technology transition. 

Competing prototypes in the context of technology transition can take the form of a competition between system upgrades. A competition between system upgrades is typically more cost effective and less risky than competing entirely new systems The incremental improvements upgrades provide go a long way towards facilitating innovation, and therefore, when still cost effective, likely should be pursued.

Competing system upgrades in a cost effective manner is again a matter of how objectives are framed. When framed in the most general terms, such as in terms of mission effectiveness and expected life-cycle costs, more options for pursuing competition result. 

One option is to compete a combination of upgrades to existing systems to determine which combination provides the most cost effective capability. The Air Force’s Enhanced Tactical Fighter program, which competed a combination of upgrades to the F-15 and F-16 fighter aircraft and led to the F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft, provides an example of this approach. 

Another option is to compete an upgrade to an existing system against the capabilities of a new one. This option is a particularly attractive means for providing competitive pressures when resources are too constrained to compete multiple new designs. What this means for program planners is that competition may be more a question of program planning than anything else. 

Given a limited supply of resources, the objective is always to allocate those resources most effectively to obtain the best mix of performance, cost, schedule and risk. Accommodating competition is one way to obtain a better mix. The challenge is to approach competition in such a way that paying for it is worth the costs.


Workshop is a vehicle for exploring, testing, and hopefully proving an AI-driven tool to generate physical designs. Implementing a divergent design flow, Workshop builds off the traditional flow: define, create, explore visualize, analyze and fabricate. Where that flow departs from the norm is in who — or rather, what — is performing or assisting in those development stages, and the extent of that assistance.

With Workshop, engineers and designers specify design goals, along with parameters such as mass, volume, and engineering constraints, as well as materials and manufacturing processes available for production. 

All that data gets digested by AI deep computational networks to create a model it concludes is the optimal balance of the given constraints. More typically, the network will generate many versions, creating tens, hundreds, or even thousands of variants, all of which balance those constraints in slightly different ways.

AI-based generative design is no replacement for a product designer or engineer. Rather, think of it more as a right-hand man — or better put, a right-hand team — with countless hours to spend on each task. It allows designers the means to explore options far more exhaustively than they otherwise ever could, make effective decisions more quickly and earlier in the process, and eventually implement a design — from concept all the way to manufacturing. 

The computational network proposes options, along with the data to indicate how well that option meets various goals and constraints, but the designer remains the guide of that process, making the key decisions and tradeoffs. Effectively, you tell your team what you’re trying to accomplish and what the limitations are, and that team reports back, “You said you wanted to do this, so here’s the avenue you should probably pursue.”

Ultimately, transformational AI-driven generative design will earn its place in product design toolboxes the same way any now-ubiquitous tools have: by proving its worth in making products faster to design, higher in quality and performance, and most amenable to the optimal means of production. For its part, generative design assists in all those goals by allowing designers to make the most effective and through decisions, and do so earlier in the process.

Workshop delivers that ability for a designer to set objectives and constraints, include limits on geometry, material type and amount, and production methods. With generative design at the fingertips, a designer can then quickly create and integrate hundreds of options, each presenting a different degree of adherence to the constraints given.

This raises a great question: How can the user avoid being overwhelmed by a potentially large number of similar-looking designs, and instead hone in effectively on the one or few best suited to the set goals and priorities? 

To make all those generative design results easier to consume, Workshop includes filters that let you sort designs using the most relevant and important info up front. Filters let you navigate, compare, and contrast the tens or hundreds of options by the degree to which those designs meet the goals and constraints. Filter by strength, mass, cost, manufacturing type, or stiffness, for example, to narrow in on and eventually identify the best option to pursue.

Arriving at the right model, or at least the best one to explore first, shouldn’t end at a creating a conceptual, stand-alone structural representation. Rather, the key is to also allow the means to bridge the gap from that machine-generated model to engineering verification and styling, and eventually on to getting it manufactured.
 
Some simple outputs are of limited value; it yields an interesting shape, but one that can’t serve any use beyond the visual. A productive workflow needs that geometry embedded with all the rich data sets needed to directly feed into simulation, verification, rendering, and on to prototype and manufacturing. 

If the machine integration produced just a shell of geometry, the designer might have to re-create the whole thing manually. Bridging the gap from synthesis to the rest of the workflow was a key design goal for Workshop generative design functionality, and its implementation is unique in the way it automates the synthesized design in a complete, usable, and editable format ready for verification, re-design, and ultimately, physical creation.

A generative design–based workflow should seamlessly culminate in a manufacturable model, be it for prototype or volume production. Workshop  generative design considers the constraints and capabilities of the manufacturing process and materials available. 

The model is particularly relevant in the context of additive methods like 3D printing, especially now given recent advancements in printing with metal. Such methods allow for shapes and structure that conventional manufacturing methods can’t achieve, making it essential for the user to provide generative design guidance on which methods are available or preferred.

But you can’t ask or expect end users to navigate the appropriate performance, features, virtual machine types, or determine when use cases might best for generative design or any other workloads headed to execution space. 

As you might guess, Workshop hides the processing wizard behind the curtain so the user doesn’t have to be concerned with how it gets done. Based on the model and constraints, Workshop assesses the workload at hand, “right-sizes” it to the appropriate machine instances, and when complete, hands it back to you inside the application.

Over time, machine learning will permeate virtually every corner of computing technology and applications. Of that, the majority of us have little doubt. In design computing, uses have already popped up to significantly improve the performance of existing 3D graphics and rendering that professionals require. But most certainly, these uses represent but the tip of the iceberg, and the real impact will come in more revolutionary applications.
The demands and workloads product design represent make it fertile ground for AI infiltration. Expect machine learning advancements to both leverage and transform the existing tried-and-true design/verify/iterate/manufacture workflow. 

Most of the possibilities we’ve likely not yet imagined, but the same would likely have been said ten years ago for generative design, an approach that offers compelling, undeniable appeal. Combine that with its natural pairing with virtual workstations, and we should see momentum increase for both approaches.

It’s time to pay close attention to what AI offers for product design computing — assisting in design creation itself, leveraging the technology to streamline workflows, improving end products, cutting costs, and shortening time to markets. Your competition likely has.

Shifting traditional design work earlier in the design process so as to avoid rework later is difficult.  A number of product development practices that have been characterised as a shift from developing a single-point design to developing a set of possible designs have proven effective at reducing development rework. 

Here we refine the definitions of such “set-based” development practices, which are aimed at early development phases, and shows how they can be applied to the systems engineering process in order to reduce or eliminate the root causes of rework

We use the term rework to specifically mean the work that occurs when a prior decision that was assumed to be final for that project is changed because it was later found to be defective. 

A decision is considered “ final” in the sense that the team does not have any reason to believe that the decision would need to change and therefore expects that development work can proceed assuming that decision will stand for the remainder of the project.

Such rework is distinct from design iterations performed for rapid learning, where the design decisions are understood to be experimental, and thus other development work does not proceed assuming those to be the final decisions.

It is also distinct from establishing rapid project cycles to accelerate customer feedback. However, rework may occur within a design iteration or rapid project cycle if a poor decision would otherwise result in the iteration or project cycle failing to achieve its goals.

Rework has become so commonplace that most development managers seem to consider it inevitable so they schedule multiple prototype build-and-test cycles into their project plans, create elaborate engineering change processes to manage multiple layers of rework, and pad schedules to account for the unknowns. Such practices do not address the root causes so that the rework can be eliminated.

But much of the rework that product development organisations experience is not inevitable. Development organisations can eliminate rework from their product development processes. But to do so requires a very different approach to the systems engineering of new products and technology, all starting with the front end of the product development process.

Several models and tools have been proposed to reduce the need for rework , but these approaches will have limited impact if they do not address the root causes of that rework.

Systems engineers and development managers are all too familiar with the frustration of seeing development teams revisit decisions made earlier in their projects and watching the ripple effects of violated assumptions, associated design changes, and reworked plans, assessments & designs they know are coming as a result. Here we provide several examples:

First, during prototype testing, teams discovers that two of the design specifications are incompatible, meaning one of them must be revised and all the spec creation to date reworked. 

Second, The product team realises to their surprise that customers do not like the trade-offs made among competing objectives, so key product features must be changed late in the game at significant cost to the organisation, or face lower than projected sales.

Third, In developing the manufacturing process, the manufacturing engineering team learns that the current equipment is not capable of manufacturing an important product feature, resulting in the tough decision either to redesign the feature thereby delaying product delivery or to invest much more than planned in updating manufacturing capability.

Finally, After market introduction or delivery to the customer, a latent design flaw results in warranty claims that eat up most of the profitability of that product, possibly even blowing up into a product recall.

The bottom line impact of unfortunate but common occurrences such as these is staggering. The cost to extract such defects can increase significantly the original development costs depending on when they are discovered.

Such defects squander market opportunities, damage brand reputation, and otherwise take huge bites out of return on investment and growth potential. Often missed are the compounding effects of frustrated employees, conflicts across organisations, and related inefficiencies.

Much of life cycle costs of a project are determined by decisions made by the end of the concept phase and most capital is committed before detailed design starts. 

Systems engineers face dilemma that often very little is known about full impact of those decisions when they are being made so it is not a surprise that such decisions are frequently revisited, and the associated development work redone.

We tried many tools to get to the final iteration. You can see in the picture we show two design iterations—the middle one that is still quite similar visually to the original node was our first iteration. And you can see version 2.0, the second iteration is where we really made the big step with the freedom of form.

Using generative design, engineers specify parameters, such as weight-to-strength ratios, efficient material use, and temperature, pressure and force ranges. The generative design engine creates several design options through an iterative approach. Engineers then evaluate and select from among the generatively designed options—more options than would be possible with traditional design tools, and likely many options that the engineers would never have considered.

No one group has complete control over the final results, so it is a lot of different engineers have to move at the same time or at least following in a series, and what you see in these processes is that they all start with great concepts but throughout the phases they become victim to planning pressure and costs so a lot of new ideas and challenges are just designed out.

In a Set-Based Design approach, which has been identified as a preferred approach for the development of future design efforts, discipline-specific designs are done in parallel across a broad design space to improve the flexibility of the design by delaying key decisions until the design space is fully understood the parallel nature of the approach also makes it an ideal fit for high performance computing

Since computers are already widely used and the current level of their usage is very high, simulation building process can lead to greatly reduced manufacturing time when you consider how sequence fits into process. 

Tools need to be verified and validated; problems must be easy to set up and run; structural process generation must be easy and quick; tools must be built to run effectively and efficiently on massive parallel computers; and, results must be timely.

Geometric assembly constraints, are easily identifiable and definable but certain constraints, especially the component constraints and soft constraints, are difficult to identify without a good realistic feel of the assembly process.

In the mixed prototyping concept, several questions need to be clarified: 1. What parts should be real prototypes? 2. What parts should be virtual? 3) How much manipulation of the virtual parts is feasible and needed, etc. Although the answers to these questions are very context dependent, basically we can make a decision based on the following aspects.

For the specific cases, it is difficult to obtain an obvious optimal solution of all these aspects. Must consider the trade-off of these aspects carefully in terms of our application and requirements to define a proper strategy for assembly evaluation based on mixed prototyping.

Initial constraints are imported into the Automatic Assembly Planning System to Generate the feasible Sequences so planners can view and verify the feasible sequences in the virtual reality working space to
Plans identify new constraints and decide on requirements change criteria e.g., cost, number of orientations, etc. Next, the users go back to the Automatic Assembly Planning System to re-plan the sequences. The planners repeat this process until they find a satisfied sequence.

1. Design Strategy must obtain economies of scale in customised productions so standard components of products have become very popular in manufacturing industry

2. In mixed prototyping concept standard parts must normally be real components since they can be found easily in stocks.

3. For some fixed designs that do not need to be changed much, can use real components through conventional rapid prototype technologies.

4. Customised parts must be evaluated and revised many times, virtual prototypes are used since flexible for modification.

5. During an assembly process impossible to connect two real components using a virtual component to obtain realistic feedback-- cannot stack a real component on a virtual component.

6. Using the largest component of an assembly as a virtual part is not ideal if several other real and virtual parts are connected to it.

7. Parts where several components are to be assembled, such as the base part, would serve better if they are real.

8. Some workspace and assembly parts cannot be completely defined and simulation is so must use real components as much as possible.

9. If prototyping cost of some components is very high, try to use virtual prototypes even though designs are already fixed.
​
10. Users can obtain more realistic assembly parts sensory feedback based on real components as compared to virtual components.
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