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This research brief addresses congressional concerns about the use of data analysis, measurement, and other evaluation-related methods in U.S. Department of Defense acquisition programs and decisionmaking.

In support of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) efforts to improve mission effectiveness and efficiency, this report identifies DoD government functions for procurement and acquisition, estimating their costs at between $29 billion and $38 billion. As a percentage of DoD contracting obligations, the program management portion of these costs have been about 1.5 percent, which is below industry benchmarks of 2 to 15 percent.

A new measure of cost growth (and thus cost control and tradeoffs) was developed to look for longitudinal performance trends over the last three decades. This measure examines annual cost changes across major contracts for development and early production on major defense acquisition programs, including overruns and scope changes. This measure should not be mistaken for the total costs of these programs but should show similar trends as other measures of total program cost growth. A 5-year moving average of the annual inflation-adjusted changes was used to smooth the data, revealing striking patterns. Statistical analysis found that the combined effect of three factors accurately models these dynamics: the defense budget; structural changes in the Goldwater-Nichols (since 1990) and Better Buying Power (since 2012) eras; and a self-correcting behavior that adjusts for prior differences between the actual growth and the anticipated cost growth from these budgetary, structural, and constant factors. Structural reductions are not due to schedule changes, quantity changes, or increased amounts of early production contracts in those periods, but changes are due to other factors, such as recent drops in total cost growth on development contracts and earlier drops on early production contracts.

This research describes an investigation into the potential impact of alternative management control policies on air traffic flow. An experiment was conducted that analyzed the effect of four different arrival management conditions under two different goal conditions on computer-simulated traffic management decision making and on simulated performance. In the condition representing the least level of central arrival management, there was no central arrival management decision maker at all. Two of the arrival management conditions resembled “free scheduling” operations: in both, a central arrival manager provided information to support independent departure decisions by air carriers, but the two conditions differed on the type of information provided. The fourth condition represented a centrally controlled arrival management operation, where the arrival manager directly limited the number of departures the air carriers could make.Each arrival management condition was simulated under two different goal cond...

Long-term (5-10 years out) projections of wind-tunnel testing demand for national-class facilities are notoriously difficult to generate given the variability of government aerospace agendas, plans, and programs. This paper presents a Monte Carlo model that decomposes the problem into two layers: the decadal likelihood of a program start and the wind-tunnel testing demands of various programs with 90% confidence intervals. Examples are provided to explain how this model could be applied to help inform decisionmakers of future wind-tunnel testing requirements and their likelihood.

Forecasting future needs for NASA’s portfolio of national-class wind tunnels is challenging due to the uncertainties involved in predicting the multiple factors driving wind tunnel utilization, and the subsequent need to understand facility-specific estimates by test capability. To help NASA’s Aeronautics Test Program with estimating the overall need for wind tunnel capacity over the next several years, the RAND Corporation has developed a “Future Needs Framework” (FNF) that maps facility-specific demand to required capabilities.