Two level maintenance: How do you get there

It is argued that proper partitioning analysis performed early in the conceptual design can rapidly identify and address significant support cost reduction opportunities for weapons systems designers. This is accomplished through design for two-level maintenance. The two-level maintenance requirement is defined and described in terms of its influence on the design process, and techniques are used to minimize weapon system logistics design issues are reported. These techniques and their benefits are described. The author concludes that there are three enabling technologies for meeting a two-level maintenance requirement: the conceptual design must be partitioned for minimum life-cycle costs, adequate built-in testing (BIT) must be designed into the hardware to provide the system maintainer with diagnostics capability to the candidate line-replaceable unit (LRU) level (from the partitioning analysis), and the candidate LRUs must be packaged for replacement in the user´s forward operating environment