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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This monograph presents an overview, illustrated by case study evidence, of the pros and cons of international collaborative weapons procurement programs.
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Declining defense budgets have prompted concern about the financial health of the prime contractors for military aircraft. In this report, the authors examine financial indicators for the seven contractors active in the 1980s.
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Declining revenues in the defense industry may eventually result in bankruptcies. This report considers whether a model could reliably predict defense contractors' bankruptcy.
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The separate essays in this volume summarize earlier RAND reports and reprint articles that have appeared in the professional literature.
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Increasing budgetary pressures and the reordering of national priorities have led to significant declines in military procurement.
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This Issue Paper examines the future of Russian weapons acquisition and military R&D, hypothesizing that the most fruitful way to examine what is still a primordial soup is to take a regional approach.
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This case study of Xerox provides an analogy of the problems facing the military acquisition system and what must be done to repair it. Many of Xerox's competitive problems originated with the phased program planning and reviews Xerox introduced when...
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Firms directly charge only a small fraction of their costs and allocate the rest across products in proportion to direct labor use. Such a practice creates a problem for defense procurement.
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The OSD asked RAND to provide research and analytic support for a strategy to reduce B-2 procurement costs.
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This study considers the formal role that transportability plays in the Department of Defense (DoD) research, development, and acquisition (RDA) process. Tradeoffs must be made between combat effectiveness and transportability.
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Part of a broader study examining the economic implications of establishing a second production source for the Advanced Cruise Missile (ACM).
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In some cases it may be actually less costly for the government to forgo competition and rely on a single supplier.
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This Note describes the Army's conventional munitions acquisition process from the generation of the estimate of the requirements for munitions to the decisions on what mix of munitions will actually be funded.
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The ability to accurately assess military resource requirements has become more important as defense budgets are strained by increased interservice competition and by political pressures. This paper chronicles the evolution of cost analysis as it has...
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This paper, which was originally presented as a talk at Science Applications, Inc., in Los Angeles in January 1979, traces the major steps in the evolution of the process that developed, by 1961, into program budgeting, which is still in place in the Depa
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Outlines an approach to reforming the defense acquisition process and describes a prescription for reform based on RAND research results.
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This paper was originally prepared for a Conference on Soviet Military Policy, held at Columbia University, New York, on April 13-14, 1984. It considers the relationship between Soviet strategic doctrine and force posture, and how they might be affec...
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Because avionics require such large investments and such long acquisition times, military services must set high performance requirements to ensure that new equipment will perform effectively against threats that will materialize during what should b...
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The requirements of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act or other budgetary constraints could lead the Air Force to consider terminating some procurement and research-and-development programs.
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Military satellite communication systems will cost taxpayers billions of dollars. The magnitude of these costs and their distribution in the economy will be directly affected by whether public policymakers choose to lease or to buy these systems.
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