A Department of Defense (DoD) M&S education task force is in the process of studying the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) education of the acquisition workforce. Historically, DoD acquisition workforce education is not referred to as education, but rather what the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) refers to as "practitioner training, career management, and services." The DAU is the organization primarily responsible for training the DoD acquisition corps in conjunction with service schools and strategic partners in the civilian sector. DAU programs primarily focus on program management, contracting, and management of logistics across the system life cycle. Further, the examples and cases used in the training are primarily DoD centric. Only select DoD employees are exposed to Harvard Business School (HBS) perspectives. The use of M&S to improve system acquisition is only delivered in three courses. Further, Simulation-Based Acquisition (SBA) as a strategy in development of various systems is not explicitly taught. The general notion for this research is that exposure of actual or potential defense acquisition students to the rich civilian literature on M&S across the enterprise life cycle and SBA in particular may be beneficial to DoD. To further this general notion, this research investigates content in courses whose curriculum, while still more than 50% DoD, contains HBS SBA and other M&S related case studies. While abbreviated for the purpose of this abstract, the overall hypothesis of this dissertation is that M&S and HBS case studies make a positive contribution to DoD or potential DoD employees. To investigate this hypothesis, this research conducted both internal and external evaluations to determine the level to which the course makes a positive contribution to the student ability to "Understand the concepts of SBA across the entire program life cycle, in order to reduce the time, resources, and risks associated with the acquisition pr This was identified by the task force as a key element in the Education Skills Requirement (ESR) that this curriculum intends to address. The internal evaluation used inferential statistics to consider the validity of the course topics, content, evaluation methods, and case study delivery method through student evaluations of a live class. Among other variables, this research tracks class participants' responses (self-assessment) and performance (subject matter expert objective assessment) demographically to include current and potential DoD employees. With the graying of DoD workforce, potential DoD employees are important to the DoD community too. The external evaluation likewise considers the validity of the course topics and content through a survey of acquisition professionals external to the class. External acquisition professionals are drawn from across DoD as well as include former DoD acquisition employees. The combination of the internal and external evaluations provides insight into these and other issues related to the course topics, content, evaluation methods, and case study delivery methods and make recommendations on these and other issues for future course offerings.

<p>When a new product should be acquired, a model over its functionality is made. A quite new idea in the military area is to use simulations to find out what and how much to acquire. Since the product never has been on the market before it is hard to know how factors in the surroundings, like weather and other active objects, will affect it. Therefore these unknown factors that appear during the creation or acquiring of a new product need to be taken into consideration.</p><p>A literature study is performed about how modelling of simulations can be done, and how unknown factors can be considered when modelling a simulation. The study goes into if unknown factors are taken into consideration when modelling in the Process component in Simulation Based Acquisition (SBA). The result of this study shows that SBA facilitates in the process of finding and reducing unknown factors.</p>

When a new product should be acquired, a model over its functionality is made. A quite new idea in the military area is to use simulations to find out what and how much to acquire. Since the product never has been on the market before it is hard to know how factors in the surroundings, like weather and other active objects, will affect it. Therefore these unknown factors that appear during the creation or acquiring of a new product need to be taken into consideration. A literature study is performed about how modelling of simulations can be done, and how unknown factors can be considered when modelling a simulation. The study goes into if unknown factors are taken into consideration when modelling in the Process component in Simulation Based Acquisition (SBA). The result of this study shows that SBA facilitates in the process of finding and reducing unknown factors.

The DoD Modeling and Simulation Steering Committee (M&S SC) identified Modeling and Simulation (M&S) as an educational objective for the Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) workforce. Notably, past usages of M&S in system acquisitions for both DoD and commercial industry have demonstrated improvements in efficiency and effectiveness over traditional acquisition techniques. However, to achieve expected and consistent performance by this workforce in these new techniques, the M&S essential skill requirements for this workforce may be extensive. This research aims to validate the content and level of competency in selected M&S tools and technology necessary for consistent workforce performance. The notion here is to achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness in the acquisition process through thresholds of competency that must be resident in or available to the acquisition workforce. This research proposes a matrix of training objectives and levels of competency for portions of the AT&L workforce that was validated through survey by individuals who are leading experts in both M&S and acquisition. This effort combines rigorously defined learning objectives and parameters by academia with practical learning insights from the military and industry ground perspectives. The resultant Joint Learning Model aims to identify the workforce educational foundations necessary to achieve more widespread efficiency and effectiveness in current and future DoD acquisitions.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Air Force SEEK EAGLE Office (AFSEO) was chartered by the Secretary of the Air Force in December 1987. The mission of the AFSEO is to provide the United States Air Force increased combat capability through central management of the aircraft-stores certification process and provide in-house engineering and operations research capabilities. Additionally, the AFSEO is required to ensure the future viability of the aircraft-stores organic in-house capability with the insertion of evolving technologies. To accomplish this mission, the AFSEO employs all phases of the test process; from Digital Model and Simulation (DMS) to Open Air Range (OAR) flight tests. The AFSEO desires to prepare for the future DoD environment, and minimize the cost of developing its products that require advanced sensors and telemetry capability. For a number of years, a mainstay in the process has been instrumented aircraft. These aircraft were specially instrumented to support the mission of AFSEO. Similarly, stores were instrumented to obtain environmental data such as loads and vibration. With the rising cost of instrumentation and the national DoD trend to reduce the cost of development and maintenance of instrumentation, a new method will need to be found. Several advanced concepts in ground and airborne instrumentation at Eglin AFB are needed to support the mission of the AFSEO. These include a new generation of telemetry devices, sensors, and data acquisition components to provide rapid and cost effective instrumentation of test aircraft, stores, and suspension equipment. The new generation telemetry will provide integrated circuitry with “peel and stick” subminiature telemetry sensors. These telemetry sensors will provide flutter and structural loads data for aircraft-stores combinations. In conjunction with the telemetry sensors, advanced aircraft platform instrumentation will be needed to match precision flight mechanics to the spatial telemetry measurements for stress, strain, and dynamic activity of stores.