Contracting for supportability and affordability

The author describes the total program cost benefits of allowing life cycle cost sensitivity analysis to drive the conceptual design development, and how the user can more effectively motivate the contractor to optimize his design for supportability and affordability. He argues that there is a need for more supportable and affordable weapon systems, and that the services are struggling with how to make that happen. He suggests that the best approach is one that derives the conceptual design process for least total ownership costs, and that once that design architecture has been identified, acquisition and management programs should be implemented based on that design architecture. He further argues that requests for proposal should require the contractor to justify why he feels his design is optimized for supportability and affordability, and should back up that requirement with scoring contracts on their multiphase costs