One Small Step for Space Acquisition Doctrine
to inform space acquisition doctrine. Future analysis could enhance the ideas presented and evaluate the data in new ways. The following recommendations highlight a few examples of how researchers could further add to the body of knowledge by leveraging this qualitative and
quantitative analysis approach. Trends Across Subgroups
The study focused on a question-by-question analysis that did not consider individual experience or rank/grade. Future research can evaluate sentiment trends and responses across each subgroup. The analysis could discover knowledge or experience gaps (e.g., the senior group has more experience with tools available to hold industry accountable) or highlight varying cultural norms (e.g., the junior group may be more knowledgeable about modern AI tools for program monitoring). Data Analysis Using Excel Leveraging an Excel file would allow a more comprehensive query of the data. It could also observe trends across more significant swaths of data (i.e., each question could be analyzed based on responses to all questions and not simply those responses to that specific question). There were moments during this study when Excel was tested, and LLM responses were considering data outside of the desired question dataset (each respondent was captured in a unique row, and each question response was in a unique column). If researchers build prompts with enough specificity and testing, they could leverage Excel to query more data more efficiently. Note that Excel files currently take more processing time and resources to query, which was another reason why Word was the tool of choice for this research. Conclusion This study sought to answer the following research questions: (a) what acquisition best practices are prevalent across the DoD that can either codify existing space acquisition policy or improve the body of knowledge, and (b) how these best practices could be used as a blueprint to introduce acquisition as a new level of the Space Force doctrine hierarchy. To answer these questions, a survey was conducted to help argue the hypothesis that ample “best practice” knowledge exists
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Defense ARJ, Summer 2025, Vol. 32 No. 2: 132—193
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