Army Weapon Systems Analysis

This book contains the proceedings of an interna tional symposium devoted to Modeling and Analysis of Defense Processes in the context of land/air warfare. It was sponsored by Panel VII (on Defense Applications of Operational Research) of NATO's Defense Research Group (DRG) and took place 27-29 July 1982 at NATO headquarters in Brussels. Except perhaps for the Theater-Level Gaming and Analysis Workshop, sponsored by the Office of united 1 states Naval Research in 1977 , this symposium was the first international scientific meeting on Operations Research/Systems Analysis in the area of land/air war fare since the conference on Modeling Land Battle Systems 2 for Military Planning sponsored by NATO's Special Pro gramme Panel on Systems Science in 1974. That conference dealt primarily with modeling small unit (company, bat talion) engagements and, to a lesser extent, large unit (corps, theater) campaigns with principal emphasis on attrition processes and movement in combat. It was considered as rather successful in that it revealed the state-of-the art around 1972 and identified problem areas and promising approaches for future developments. lWith regard to foreign attendance, this wo- shop was largely limited to participants from the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany (see L.J. Low: Theater-Level Gaming and Analysis Workshop for Force Planning, Vol II-Summary, Discus sion of Issues and Requirements for Research, SRI Report, May, 1981).

In recent decades, there have been numerous attempts to rein in the cost growth of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition programs. Cost growth is the ratio of the cost estimate reported in a program's final Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) and the cost-estimate baseline reported in a prior SAR issued at a particular milestone. Drawing on prior RAND research, new analyses of completed and ongoing weapon system programs, and data drawn from SARs, this study addresses the following questions: What is the cost growth of DoD weapon systems? What has been the trend of cost growth over the past three decades? To address the magnitude of cost growth, it examines cost growth in completed programs; to evaluate the cost growth trend over time, it provides additional analysis of a selection of ongoing programs. This sample of ongoing programs permits a look at growth trends in the more recent past. Changes in the mix of system types over time and dollar-weighted analysis were also considered because earlier studies have suggested that cost growth varies by program type and the cost of the program. The findings suggest that development cost growth over the past three decades has remained high and without any significant improvement.