January 2020
Block Upgrades , Evolutionary Acquisition, and Ag i le Development. Some program ofces intend from early on to upgrade or replace the initial design with an improved future design, but do not yet knowwhat those changes will be or what they will cost. Theymay not know which attributes will be enhanced, since that decision will be based on developments in the future. If multiple changes are made to the weapon system design at a few discrete points in time, these are often termed block upgrades. If many changes aremade on an ongoing basis as their usefulness becomes known, this is sometimes referred to as evolutionary acquisition. The special case of software programs undergoing repeated rapid insertion of new features in close collaborationwith the users of the software is called agile development.
In each of these cases, the reporting challenge is that the planners and cost analysts know that they intend to spend money in the future, but they do not know what they will be spending it on, what it will cost, or when it will happen. The challenges for oversight and management are obvious— especially when a program being managed in this way is shoehorned into a reporting system designed for unchanging units. This is part of what happened to the RQ-4 Global Hawk program, which was intended from the beginning as an evolutionary acquisition, but program planners were required to guess both content and schedule of future upgrades as part of its original acquisition baseline. Those guesses were then treated as frm requirements by the acquisition system, even after Air Force leaders had changed their minds about both priorities and threshold performance.
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Defense ARJ, January 2020, Vol. 27No. 1 : 28-59
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