Book Description

The Army acquisition community stands at a critical juncture. The Future Combat System, the centerpiece of Army transformation, has proven to be more expensive and technologically more complicated than originally anticipated, and the rapid pace of ongoing operations means that many key weapon systems will reach the end of their service lives sooner than planned or will require intensive maintenance to keep functioning. The future presents even more challenges for which the Army must prepare, including a wide range of dangerous adversaries, the potential reallocation of combat tasks across and among the services, and the prospect of budget pressures. Taken together, these circumstances raise some important questions for the Army acquisition community. What should a robust acquisition investment strategy look like -- one designed to perform well against all of the anticipated threats? Further, how should the Army acquisition community assess the appropriateness of its investment strategy as time goes by? This study seeks to provide insight into these questions by describing a new way for the Army to assess investments across a broad range of options. This method, the Acquisition Investment Management (AIM) model, incorporates Assumption-Based Planning (ABP), a tool developed by RAND to assist in planning during uncertain times. Following an introductory chapter, Chapter Two describes how the authors developed and applied the Army acquisition investment strategy process. Chapter Three discusses how this process could be incorporated into the Army's current programming and budgeting activities. Chapter Four concludes with lessons for the acquisition community drawn from the period between the two World Wars. Four appendixes support the analysis with details of Assumption-Based Planning, alternative sets of circumstances, the budget categories the research employed to create the acquisition investment strategy development process, and an account of the interwar era.