Product Development Strategies in Evolutionary Acquisition

One of the significant issues is the increasing cost of military products. Norm Augustine noted in the late 1980s, that without intervention, by 2054 the military budget would afford one aircraft. Significant work has been done to reduce costs through ‘Lean’ initiatives, a waste-reduction methodology practiced in the Japanese automobile industry for some time. Nevertheless, the majority of these changes have taken place in manufacturing, with changes in supplier networks and product development only recently beginning to emerge. At the same time, the engineering community has become critically aware that design choices determine an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the product cost. The result has been a strong push, like that in the military, to make better
design decisions.