Complexity in an Unexpected Place: Quantities in Selected Acquisition Reports
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equipment (GFE). The estimated cost to complete the new-build program was $2.19 billion for 112 units, or $19.5 million per unit, of which $2.4 million per unit was expected to be GFE. This refects the expectation that units authorized through FY 2013 would use recovered avionics suites from existing aircraft, but that half of the new-build units after that would require new-build (contractor-furnished) avionics. The program office staf clearly anticipated diferences in components and cost between units produced up to that point and units expected to be produced in the future. Furthermore, inconsistencies emerged between the SAR and the PB submissions regarding which units comprise the CH-47F program. How new builds versus SLEPs are counted in diferent years is unusual and is described in detail in a later subsection called “Reporting Accidents.” We have divided the common diferences among unit defnitions into three buckets: changes over time, mixed types of units, and reporting acci- dents. It is not uncommon for more than one category to apply to a given program; the Chinook has all three. The next three sections describe what each of these categories means, how confusions arise, and what cost ana- lysts should do when trying to use cost-reporting data. At the end, we make somemodest recommendations formodifcations to acquisition data report- ing that could helpmake the datamore useful for many sorts of analyses. As part of those recommendations, we consider the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program—how its reporting might have been done diferently and what the ramifcations of those diferences might have been. Changes Over Time Implicit in the concept of a unit of measurement is that every instance of the unit should be identical. Every inch should be the same length, every second should have the same duration, and every run scored in a baseball game should count equally. 4 As noted earlier, this is often not true of pro- curement units in MDAPs. One reason that nonidentical units might arise is that the product may evolve over time. Even when counting quantities is simple, such as when counting helicopters or ships, the units procured at diferent times are usually diferent in both cost and capability. In our full report (Davis, Giles, & Tate, 2017), we detail changes over time in ships, tactical aircraft, and tactical land vehicles. In this excerpted article, we look only at one program, the Air Force’s AIM-120AdvancedMediumRange Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) program. Organization/Common Diferences Among Unit Defnitions
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Defense ARJ, January 2020, Vol. 27No. 1 : 28-59
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