Navy/OSD Collaborative Review of Acquisition Policy for DoD C3I and Weapon Programs

The purpose of the project is to review current DoD policy governing the development and upgrade of interoperable command, control, communication, and intelligence (C3I) and weapon systems. Our focus, therefore, is those elements of DoD policy that pertain to the IT component of these programs. We reviewed this policy area to identify ambiguities, conflicts, overlaps, and shortfalls in these policies and to recommend solutions for clarifying the ambiguities, mitigating the shortfalls, filling the gaps, and resolving the conflicts we found in the policy statements. We examined five policy areas that apply to the interoperability of C3I and weapon systems. We started by looking at the requirement-gathering process. The current process is governed by requirement policy as defined in the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) documentation. Next, we reviewed DoD acquisition policy as determined by DoD 5000 series documentation, as well as several recent studies of the acquisition system that identify where current policy may be deficient and can be improved. Following acquisition, we turned our focus to examining interoperability and supportability policy that has been developed and recently revised specifically for IT systems. Next, we examined a new policy area designed to enhance and ensure the effective integration of global information grid (GIG) component programs so they perform effectively as an end-to-end (E2E) system of systems. Policies in this new area are in the net-centric implementation documents (NCIDs). Finally, we examine information assurance (IA) policy.