N Peter Whitehead

The U. S. government has developed hundreds of approaches to promote and protect critical technologies and their associated industrial base, and the sheer number and diversity of these programs, policies, and initiatives present a logistical challenge for the U. S. Department of Defense (DoD). The authors of this report describe a tool designed to help DoD decisionmakers--upon discovering a risk or vulnerability to a critical technology--quickly and effectively determine relevant approaches to mitigate the problem.

RAND researchers worked to understand the costs and benefits of digital engineering in the U. S. Department of Defense (DoD) and develop a decision support framework for digital engineering activities in weapon system programs. The authors reviewed existing literature and developed decision support frameworks incorporating (1) established DoD cost-benefit analysis approaches and (2) established systems engineering decision methodologies.