Rapid Acquisition of Army Command and Control Systems
Abstract
For the past decade, the U.S. Army has been engaged in extended overseas conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. These conflicts tested the technologies the military developed during the preceding Cold War and post Cold War periods in many unanticipated ways. The wartime1 operational pressures revealed gaps in the Army s capabilities, and spurred an urgent drive from both the Army and the Department of Defense (DoD) to fill those gaps with new technology solutions. What followed was a period of organizational creativity within the Army, where decisionmakers responding to the urgent operational needs from the field were also equipped in an unprecedented manner with a source of immediate flexible funding to respond to those needs: congressionally allocated supplemental funding. Perceiving both urgent needs and having in hand the resources to address them, the Army did not rely on the full formal structures of the Defense Acquisition System reflected in DoD Instruction 5000.02 on Operation of the Defense Acquisition System, because following that processwould have taken too long to deliver the needed items.2 Instead, the Army and DoD developed, viewed from the highest level, two types of methods to perform rapid acquisition during this period: Establishing named, formally designated, rapid acquisition structures (i.e., process and organizations) Applying the traditional acquisition structures in an unusual, non- program of record, ad hoc manner.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2014
- Accession Number
- ADA598967
Entities
People
- Douglas Shontz
- Jeffrey A. Drezner
- Jerry M. Sollinger
- Megan Mckernan
- Shara Williams
Organizations
- RAND Corporation