Jeffrey A. Drezner

To determine whether the industrial base for the U. S. domestic coal-based electricity generation industry can maintain the capability to design, construct, operate, and maintain coal-fired electricity generating units within reasonable cost, schedule, performance, environmental, and quality expectations, this book reviews interviews with stakeholders and data describing key elements of industry capability and validation or verification of concerns.

Defense acquisition is one of the most urgent issues that the Department of Defense faces today. In an effort to provide the department and the nation with guidance on defense acquisition challenges, the authors present detailed proposals to improve defense acquisition through initiatives focused on competition, novel systems, risk management, organizational factors, prototyping, and the acquisition workforce.

Contrary to widespread perceptions, program office personnel do not spend inordinate amounts of time on statutory and regulatory compliance activities. Further, the authors could not identify any areas in which policy change or streamlining implementation would save significant dollars in program management funds, reduce personnel, or improve program outcomes.

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics asked RAND to evaluate the cost of compliance with acquisition-related statutes and regulations at the program office level. This report identifies the areas considered most burdensome and describes the study's methodology, focus, and data collection process, including the development of a Web-based data collection tool for use by program office personnel.

An evaluation of new acquisition strategies for the development of unmanned aerial vehicles. Over the past three decades, efforts to develop unmanned aerial vehicles have been severely hampered by escalating costs, slipped schedules, and disappointing operational results. Recently, however, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in conjunction with the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office, launched an initiative -- designated the High-Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration (HAE UAV ACTD) program -- whose objective was to overcome these deficits through the use of a new and innovative acquisition policy. This report evaluates several key elements of this new strategy toward the goal of determining how they affected the development of two air vehicles: the first a conventional vehicle (Global Hawk) and the second a low-observable configuration (DarkStar). The authors found that the ACTD approach required that the entire development effort be planned at the program's inception, which proved to be a detriment to the effort as a whole. In addition, the program's single requirement -- a 10 million dollar unit flyaway price -- proved unattainable and was eventually abandoned. At the same time, the authors found that the program's designation as an ACTD, its use of Other Transaction Authority, and its delegation of considerable management responsibility to contractors greatly streamlined the oversight process and lent considerable flexibility to the effort. As a direct result of these factors, the Global Hawk program was judged to have successfully and cost-effectively produced a continuous, all-weather, wide-area surveillance capability for future warfighters. The authors thus conclude that although the DarkStar program was canceled before its capabilities could be fully demonstrated, the HAE UAV ACTD program was in aggregate a success. [AF]

An assessment of the innovative management approach used to develop two unmanned aerial vehicles.

This title looks at the effect of new acquisition strategies on an unmanned aerial vehicle's transition from one agency to another as well as from development and test to production.