With an eye to making defense acquisition more effective and efficient, the authors explore defense contractor motivations in pursuing defense contracts and identify mechanisms that might more closely align those incentives with Department of Defense goals. They enumerate several motivations that drive contractors, most of which center on the financial aspects of running an enterprise. Then, they turn to the other side of the negotiating table and identify areas of influence or levers that the government can use to align the contracting process more closely with contractor motivations. They also analyze major defense acquisition programs to determine if it is possible to identify programs that might incur a future Nunn-McCurdy breach by reviewing a number of acquisition programs that have incurred breaches in the past and analyzing them for common characteristics. Their analytic framework enables oversight officials to identify programs with a greater risk of incurring a critical cost breach, which enables officials to focus more intently on a smaller set of programs and which provides hypotheses about what to look for in these programs.
Congressional concern with cost overruns, or breaches, in several major defense acquisition programs led the authors, in a partnership with the Performance Assessments and Root Cause Analysis Office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense ...
This report documents the structured process that was developed to help project teams identify acquisition framing assumptions (FAs), which are useful in defining and tracking key program assumptions throughout the...
In this book, Peter Levine addresses why, despite a long history of attempted reform, the Pentagon continues to struggle to reduce waste and inefficiency.
This new edition provides updated analysis on cyberespionage, including the enigmatic behavior of Russian actors, making this volume a timely and necessary addition to the cyber-practitioner's library.
Congress asked about acquisition data analytics in the Department of Defense.
Addressing Cost Growth of Major Department of Defense Weapons Systems: Hearing Before the Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services,...
It is possible to achieve some degree of commonality without joint program management and identifies lessons from historical experience and how they apply to the joint Future Vertical Lift initiative.
Multiyear Procurement (MYP) and Block Buy Contracting in Defense Acquisition: Background and Issues for Congress
The authors prototyped a new way to apply data analysis on a variety of government and commercial data sources to assess the relative contractor performance risks in Air Force acquisition contracts and programs.
In the Department of Defense, 63 distinct acquisition reform (AR) initiatives were undertaken in the 1989-2002 period. This monograph classifies the initiatives according to various criteria: basic AR theme; relationship...