An Acquisition Strategy, Process, and Organization for Innovative Systems

There is a widespread belief that in the future some military threats might be quite different from those of the recent past-requiring a response by innovative system and employment concepts. Our present weapon-system acquisition process was designed for a different environment than the one that exists today and seems ill suited to meet demands posed by the apparent expansion of unconventional and asymmetric threats. In response to this new environment, recent calls for reform have placed special emphasis on the need for an acquisition process that is better able to satisfy the need for truly innovative system concepts. We outline a suggested acquisition strategy, process, and organization that would operate in conjunction with the present process, and that is specially designed for effective development of novel and more risky system concepts. We describe this strategy in enough detail to identify its key elements, suggesting how it could work and why we believe it would provide needed capabilities not present in our current acquisition process.