Complexity in an Unexpected Place: Quantities in Selected Acquisition Reports
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Endnotes 1 PARCA was an ofce under the aegis of the Ofce of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, or OUSD(AT&L). Neither OUSD(AT&L) nor PARCA exist any longer after the Ofce of the Secretary of Defense was reorganized in 2018. 2 The PB and annual SAR submissions both generally come out in the second quarter of each FY. The years on a matching budget and SAR set difer by two. The budget is named for the year ahead and the SAR is a snapshot of the program in the recent past. For example, in the second quarter of FY 2016, the FY 2017 budget was released, quickly followed by the December 2015 SAR. 3 SLEP is the acronym for “Service Life Extension Program,” and is often used as a verb in defense circles. A SLEP can be funded with either Procurement or Operations and Maintenance dollars. 4 It is true that sometimes we use units that are clearly not identical. A hockey team can put six players on the ice and no two players are identical. But for purposes of the “too many men” rule, they are all identical. Similarly, a car dealership might count how many cars they sell, but a day where they sold 20 isn’t necessarily better than a day when they sold 19, because not all car sales generate the same proft. When using collective units like this, it may hide as well as reveal, and users of the data should be careful. 5 Or, more precisely, leadership decides how the program should be managed and what systems it should produce, possibly without considering the impact this will have on the coherence and consistency of quantity or unit cost reporting. 6 PNO 449, “Ofensive Anti-Surface Warfare Increment 1 (Long Range Anti-Ship Missile),” abbreviated as “OASuW Inc 1 (LRASM).” 7 The “J” in JASSM stands for “Joint” and at one point there was consideration of mounting this weapon on Navy aircraft. However, that has not happened, and all of the funds in the SAR are reported from Air Force appropriations. 8 This is what has happened with the AIM-120 AMRAAM program, as described in the section on "Monitoring Changes over Time," p. 43. 9 Unfortunately, the program did not similarly distinguish the variant rockets being produced, or the later conversion of the entire system from an unguided rocket launcher to a guided missile launcher. 10 The December 2015 SAR for the remanufacture program lists four procurement contracts and two RDT&E contracts. The new-build SAR only shows one contract, which is one of the four procurement contracts in the remanufacture program. 11 The two were the M1128 Mobile Gun System (MGS), which was designed to mount a tank-like 105 mm direct fre cannon on a relatively light wheeled vehicle; and the M1135 Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, Reconnaissance Vehicle (NBC RV), which required a suite of sophisticated environmental sensors and a positive- overpressure internal environment.
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Defense ARJ, January 2020, Vol. 27No. 1 : 28-59
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