Acquisition and Technology
Overview
Technology has long been an advantage for U.S. forces, and the advances now coming off the shelf could increase America's lead. At the same time, decisionmakers must develop and acquire cutting-edge military systems in an era of ever-tighter resource constraints. They must also consider the implications of information warfare, constantly emerging battlefield technologies, and advanced modeling and simulation for military practice.
Organization
RAND research on acquisition and technology issues is conducted within each of RAND's national security research divisions and collaboratively across the RAND research community.
Key Research Centers:
- RAND Arroyo Center, the RAND Army Research Division: Force Development and Technology Program
- RAND Project AIR FORCE: Aerospace Force Development Program and Resource Management Program
- RAND National Security Research Division: Acquisition and Technology Policy Center
Featured Findings
Related Publications
Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century — 2008
Escalation is a natural tendency in any form of human competition. When such competition entails military confrontation or war, the pressure to escalate can become intense due to the potential cost of losing conflicts of deadly force. Cold War—era thinking about escalation focused on the dynamics of bipolar, superpower confrontation and strategies to control it. Today's security environment, however, demands that the United States be prepared for a host of escalatory threats involving not only long-standing nuclear powers, but also new, lesser nuclear powers and irregular adversaries, such as insurgent groups and terrorists. This examination of escalation dynamics and approaches to escalation management draws on historical examples from World War I through Somalia in the early 1990s. It reveals that, to manage the risks of escalatory chain reactions in future conflicts, military and political leaders will need to understand and dampen the mechanisms of deliberate, accidental, and inadvertent escalation. Informing the analysis are the results of two modified Delphi exercises, which focused on a potential conflict between China and the United States over Taiwan and a potential conflict between states and nonstate actors in the event of a collapse of Pakistan's government.
The Defense Acquisition Workforce: An Analysis of Personnel Trends Relevant to Policy, 1993-2006 — 2008
The defense acquisition workforce includes more than 130,000 military and civilian personnel responsible for providing a wide range of acquisition, technology, and logistics support to the nation's warfighters. This report summarizes workforce analyses that RAND has undertaken in support of the Defense Acquisition University, which is responsible for strategic human capital management of that workforce. It covers the civilian acquisition workforce, the careers of acquisition workforce senior executive service members, and the military acquisition workforce and its implications for the larger workforce. It also describes an inventory projection model that uses data on the civilian acquisition workforce as a key input. The authors conclude that better definition and tracking of the acquisition workforce would improve workforce planning and that workforce analysis is only one step in an overall strategic human capital planning effort.
Insights on Aircraft Programmed Depot Maintenance: An Analysis of F-15 PDM — 2008
This technical report describes the F-15 programmed depot maintenance (PDM) process as performed at the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center (WR-ALC) in FYs 2004-2006. WR-ALC has a sequential process that F-15s follow when undergoing PDM. The average WR-ALC F-15 PDM visit runs behind schedule. This problem was reduced in recent years, largely because planned durations became more realistic. Durations also seem longer because customers do not pick aircraft up as soon as they finish PDM. Pickup lags for F-15s based overseas are expected, because they are typically flown overseas in pairs to make more efficient use of aerial tanker refueling. However, even for continental United States-based aircraft, it was not uncommon for operators to wait a week or more to retrieve their completed F-15s. Finally, the number of days spent at specific steps in the PDM process varies considerably, and, because PDM does not have a particularly high priority, it can wait a long time for parts. This leads to aircraft moving through PDM steps out of sequence, with missing parts catching up with the aircraft when they become available, or to cannibalization, in which aircraft that recently entered PDM provide cannibalized parts for aircraft that are scheduled to leave sooner.
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