Maintaining a military that is prepared to face uncertain future security challenges often requires the acquisition and procurement of new and technologically advanced equipment, which is a major expense for any nation. For decades, RAND has researched and evaluated military acquisition and procurement activities, providing essential recommendations to allow military decisionmakers to manage costs and streamline the acquisition process more effectively.
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The National Audit Office (NAO) asked RAND Europe to identify which recent MOD Value for Money (VFM) reports are likely to have led to financial savings within the Department.
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Analyzes the underlying factors that triggered the unprecedented surge in titanium price after 2003 and reviews future market prospects and emerging technologies to assess their implications for the production cost of future military airframes.
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Examines the impact of organizational roles and management complexity on defense acquisition outcomes.
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Identifies the benefits and drawbacks of competition in defense acquisitions and uses RAND's required cost reduction methodology to show how DoD can determine when the introduction of competition during production is a reasonable strategy.
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Proposes a new paradigm in which the basis of management and oversight of a major defense acquisition program would be the level of risk it represents, including technical, system integration, design, production, and business innovation risk.
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Examines concerns about the size, quality, and effectiveness of the defense acquisition workforce and highlights areas where better evidence is needed to understand the linkage between workforce attributes and acquisition outcomes.
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Reviews four decades of RAND research on prototyping, concluding that evidence of its benefits is mixed, but there are some conditions under which prototyping is more likely to yield them.
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Describes the special features of novel systems and then outlines the major elements of an acquisition strategy that would be more consistent with these features and with the expected environment of urgency that might attend their development.
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Examines the desirable and undesirable trade-offs that U.S. Army decisionmakers must make regarding commonality in military equipment.
News Release
Many of the goods and services purchased by the U.S. Department of Defense are from industries that are often better suited to larger companies rather than smaller ones, complicating efforts to meet goals that about one-fourth of prime-contract dollars be awarded to small businesses.
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Analyzes the reason for the comparatively high growth in the cost of space systems by means of an in-depth study of two systems: SBIRS-High and GPS.
Research Brief
To preserve its ability to design, build, and support complex warships and submarines, the UK's Ministry of Defence will need to preserve and sustain several key technical skills in the maritime domain.
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This report explores why, in recent decades, military fixed-wing aircraft costs have escalated faster than the rates of inflation, examining both economy-driven factors that the Services cannot control and customer-driven ones that they can.
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Cost growth in major weapon-systems programs results from errors in estimation and scheduling, government decisions, financial matters, and miscellaneous sources, with decisions involving changes in requirements, quantities, and production schedules the dominant cause.
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Building on prior RAND research, this monograph explores the need for and retention of technical skills in the UK's naval industrial base, particularly among designers and engineers involved with surface ship and submarine acquisition and support.
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This study examines U.S. Air Force in-theater contingency purchases made in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom during fiscal years 2003 and 2004 and develops a custom database to assist in analysis of demand and future decisionmaking.
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To help the Air Force assess the effectiveness of its purchasing and supply-chain management initiative, the authors have developed an econometric model to help isolate the effects of this initiative from those of other possible influences.
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As Congress reauthorizes the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, it is considering how much, if any, of SBIR set-asides SBIR could use for administration. This report estimates how much administering the DoD SBIR program costs.
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Expenditures on purchased goods and services constitute large and growing portions of the budgets for most enterprises. The authors offer a set of steps for managing these, synthesized from the literature for analyzing total spending on commodities.
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To provide the Air Force with a tool to better understand budgetary submissions, we develop several budget estimating relationships to explain why net sales of flying depot-level reparables are at historic levels.
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