A commercial approach to military system sustainment

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has utilized commercially-built military systems designed with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and software in an attempt to cut costs. Supporting and maintaining these commercial systems need to have a different approach than the existing maintenance concepts for the proprietary military systems. In this paper we will look at a streamlined process on DoD C-17 Automated Test Equipment (CATE) using a commercial approach to support and maintain them. Test equipment obsolescence is a serious problem in DoD ATE systems today, especially with a commercial system. The CATE is a commercial system integrated with COTS software and hardware. In its brief lifetime of approximately 10 years the CATE in particular averages an obsolescence of two and a half COTS hardware or Tester Replaceable Units (TRUs) every three years. The lifespan support on the CATE COTS software averages just less than two years. As the TRUs and software become obsolete and unsupportable a streamlined process is necessary and critical in finding and qualifying alternate TRUs and software. This streamlined process needs to reduce the total life-cycle costs of maintenance support while maintaining the current availability of the deployed fleet of CATEs and the continued seamlessly uninterrupted support of the Test Program Sets (TPSs) that run on them.