Successful Strategies for Achieving Reliability Requirements in Weapon Systems Acquisition

Abstract

Reducing the logistics burden is a current focus for the Army as it works to develop and field the Objective Force. Increasing reliability is a proven way to achieve this goal, with an added benefit of reducing O&S costs and increasing the effectiveness of the soldiers. Many programs have had difficulty achieving their required reliability. Operational Testing data gathered by the Army Test and Evaluation Command indicates a decreasing trend in achieving reliability requirements with more than 80% failing to achieve requirements. It is intuitive that it would be even more difficult to achieve ultra-reliability, a higher level of reliability and a proposed goal of the Future Combat Systems Program. To determine what successful practices should be used to achieve reliability requirements, we should look to successful programs to show us the way. To that end, this exploratory study questions successful Army programs for practices, recommendations, and lessons learned, that could be shared with other programs to achieve reliability requirements. If we are unsuccessful in our endeavors to improve reliability achievement, future forces will be unnecessarily burdened by our mistakes and incapable of progress.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2002
Accession Number
ADA403521

Entities

People

  • James M. Thorne

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Autonomy
  • C4I
  • Human Systems
  • Sensors
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Command And Control
  • Data Analysis
  • Electronic Mail
  • Engineers
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Lessons Learned
  • Logistics
  • Maintenance
  • Military Applications
  • Reliability
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Test Methods
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Unmanned Vehicles

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Life Cycle Cost Analysis
  • Software Engineering
  • Systems Analysis and Design