At the turn of the 21st century, segments of the U.S. Navy met tightening budget expectations by reducing expenses for maintenance, reporting, and inspections. These actions initially saved millions of dollars in manpower costs. But with smaller crews, fewer inspections, and reduced oversight, the savings proved short-lived. Instead of saving costs, readiness suffered in the long term and required significant funding for increased manning and maintenance. The lesson here, for both the Navy and the defense industry, is to approach today’s inevitable budget cuts with one eye on saving costs now—and the other on the cuts’ potential impact.
Clearly, business-as-usual is not a viable option in the present defense environment of shrinking budgets, demands for greater efficiency, advanced technical complexities, and emerging warfighting requirements. To regain insight into and control over major programs, the Department of Defense (DOD) is wisely planning more active and direct roles in managing systems engineering and integration, commonly known as SE&I. A greater government investment in SE&I will result in significant savings to the Navy in a variety of ways, including eliminating indirect costs such as a fee to oversee subcontracted services. This can only be achieved with a government workforce well-trained in SE&I and acquisition management and prepared to deliver effective oversight and supervision.
By its very nature, SE&I facilitates cost-effective decision making. It is the purposeful organization, application, and delivery of engineering knowledge for the definition, development, and deployment of technical systems. This is an interdisciplinary field that establishes how complex systems or families of systems are managed over a project’s life cycle and, increasingly, across enterprises. Even before taking into account the challenges of fiscal austerity and national-security mission realignment, there is a perennial and growing need for high-caliber SE&I to assure program performance and product affordability. It can help ensure the system design continues to work after program and mission objectives have been changed; identify which cost cuts will have the least effect on the system; and establish the tradeoffs needed to balance system optimization with available funds. In other words, responsive and timely SE&I prevents programs from being compromised by inaccurate baseline requirements, poor execution discipline, and budget churn.
Today’s defense programs are large and complex, with numerous interfaces. These systems must work the first time and every time. SE&I is a proven and measurable contributor to these programs’ success. This is where industry can help.
For example, while planning to comply with the base realignment and closure initiative, a DOD organization estimated necessary changes would cost 15 percent of the total budget. But when SE&I processes were applied, with repeatable procedures, quantitative metrics, and continual analysis for improvement, only 3.6 percent of the budget was spent on anticipated changes, saving the agency more than $200 million. In another case, an intelligence customer used SE&I processes to analyze current space architecture, cost constraints, and mission needs. The provider saved the program from cancellation by proposing a mission-focused architecture with an acquisition strategy that fit the customer’s budget and satisfied the mission requirements.
The inevitable fiscal belt-tightening will require cutbacks to many systems; the challenge is to do so without compromising national security. A responsive SE&I capability will lessen the budget impact to U.S. national security by helping sustain our edge in defense and intelligence systems. A strong commitment to SE&I is essential to ensuring a solid program foundation in terms of requirements and architecture decisions.
Supporting the Navy’s SE&I transition requires a disciplined process, specialized talent, and leading-edge tools spanning the life cycle of weapon systems. Against the backdrop of intense budget constraints, experienced, analytical, and independent systems engineering and integration is necessary now, to prevent program overruns, delivery delays, and mission misalignment later.
As the reduced readiness and increased costs caused by false savings in maintenance and reporting have demonstrated, cuts to solid management tools such as SE&I will result in inefficient program execution and greater expense. The Navy would be wise to sustain and even increase its investment in sound management processes such as SE&I to increase efficiency and combat readiness in the long term.