Office Of The Secretary Of Defense Research Articles

Simulation analysis of applicant scheduling and processing alternatives at a military entrance processing station

Eligibility for enlistment into the US military is assessed by the United States Military Entrance Processing Command (USMEPCOM), an independent agency that reports to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and not to any specific branch of military service. This research develops a discrete-event simulation for applicant processing operations at a Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) to investigate the viability of potential alternatives to the current applicant arrival and processing operation. Currently, all applicants arrive to the MEPS at the beginning of the processing day in a single batch. This research models and compares two alternatives with the status quo: split-shift processing, by which applicant arrivals occur in two batches: one at 06:00 and one at 11:00 and appointment-based processing, by which applicants may arrive during one of three, four, six, or eight appointment windows. Express-lane processing is also explored, in which applicants are allowed to bypass select processing stations. Experimental results indicate that split-shift processing is not viable under the current processing model due to an unacceptable decrease in applicant throughput. Results from appointment-based scenarios are mixed, with the critical factors being the time between appointment batches and their associated arrival times.

Methods in macroeconomic forecasting uncertainty analysis: an assessment of the 2015 National Defense Stockpile Requirements Report

To sustain the essential civilian economy and provide for the national defense during a national emergency scenario, the United States Department of Defense (U.S. DoD) maintains a stockpile of strategic and critical materials that are key to the functionality of the national industrial base. The National Defense Stock Piling Act (50 U.S. Code 98) mandates the existence of the National Defense Stockpile, as well as a biennial requirements report provided to the U.S. Congress by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), which guides the selection of the types and quantities of materials in the National Defense Stockpile (NDS). Estimates of potential material shortfalls, or the differences between material demands and supplies, under the assumptions and prescriptions of a “Base Case” national emergency planning scenario are a primary component of the report. The National Defense Stock Piling Act also mandates that a variety of parametric sensitivity studies of the Base Case be included in the NDS report. In compliance with this aspect of the law, the baseline macroeconomic forecast that drives Base Case material demand estimates is systematically perturbed and then used to calculate adjusted material shortfalls, characterizing the sensitivity of material shortfall estimates to macroeconomic forecast uncertainty. Ultimately, this process leads to a better understanding of the impact of economic forecasting errors, which are a proxy for forecast uncertainty, on the material shortfall estimates contained in the NDS requirements report. The mathematical characterization of shortfall estimate uncertainties potentially motivates more conservative stockpiling policies, such as worst-case planning practices designed to hedge against maximum downside risks. While many approaches to the perturbation analysis are reasonable, a specific method for examining uncertainty was consistently implemented in past NDS reports and reused for the 2015 NDS Requirements Report. This paper quantifies the sensitivity of the NDS recommendations to macroeconomic forecasting errors and describes the methods used to conduct the sensitivity analysis. These methods are compared and contrasted to showcase the current techniques employed by the DoD to quantify its exposure to critical material risk.

Application of System Design for Operational Effectiveness for Architectural Modeling of the SoS Relationship between Primary and Enabling Systems

Abstract Government mandates to control costs throughout the life cycle of a product necessitate a comprehensive architecture and methodology from design through operations and sustainment. The Systems Design for Operational Effectiveness (SDOE) model developed by Stevens Institute has become the basis of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) guidance with a focus on increasing reliability and reducing logistics footprint. The complexity of systems of systems approaches and model based systems development increases when both on-board and off-board enabling systems are considered. Models for both should be included in any comprehensive digital tapestry. There are multiple digital threads for life cycle data for the enabling systems to represent the necessary causal relationships between primary and enabling systems that determine operational effectiveness. To address this challenge, a reusable architecture and methodology for addressing this complexity is the first step. This framework can support definition and advanced application of data analytics and big data approaches to the digital threads that define the interaction between primary and enabling system, the industrial enterprise, and the deployed environment, providing the variables which contribute to operational outcomes, and effectiveness. This includes analysis of feedback from actual operations compared with planned suitability analysis during the design phase.

Efficient Rare Earth Separation Technology

Reactive Innovations, LLC and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) have demonstrated an innovative improved process for extracting and separating light rare earth metals (La, Ce, Sm, Nd, Pr) from solution. Rare earth metals are valued for their unique magnetic, optical and catalytic properties. These materials are used in many clean energy technologies including wind turbines, electric vehicles, photovoltaic thin films and fluorescent lighting. Currently, China produces 95-97% of the world supply of rare earth metals and oxides, but is reducing exports and increasing prices to foreign consumers. The global impact of these restrictions is greatest in countries with large high-tech manufacturing sectors such as Japan, the USA and Germany.Lanthanides are typically found in mineral deposits. While the mining of the mineral deposits is fairly straightforward, the separation and purification of the individual lanthanide elements is laborious and energy intensive. New technologies are sought to enable more rapid, flexible, efficient, environmentally-friendly extraction and separation of individual lanthanides from aqueous mixtures with the goal of increasing the domestic supply of rare earth elements and decrease the costs of processing high purity metals.Our approach to extraction and separation of individual lanthanide metals involves selective electrodeposition from an ionic liquid media. Cyclic voltammograms taken for each of these systems clearly show multiple oxidation and reduction peaks which are characteristic of multi-valent electron transfer processes for these species as shown in Figure 1. Using this data, separate experiments were performed to electrodeposit individual rare earth metals using a constant potential method. Visually, we observed material deposited on grafoil substrates for each of the rare earth-IL systems. Further analysis by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS) confirmed rare earth elements in the deposit. For illustrative purposes, Figure 2 is a representative SEM micrograph of a lanthanide deposited onto grafoil showing bulk deposition.We also demonstrated selective electrodeposition from binary mixtures in limited studies. By overlaying the individual CVs of rare earth oxides we selected two rare earth systems and reduction potentials to use in a mixture for demonstration of selective deposition of one or the other rare earth metal. Based on the differences in these CVs we utilized different deposition potentials to preferentially deposit one of the rare earths from an equimolar mixture of lanthanum and praseodymium precursors. The SEM image for deposits obtained at one voltage are provided in Figure 3 along with the EDS spectra taken for that sample. The EDS analysis indicated that preferential deposition of La occurred at this potential with ~80% of the total deposits associated with this species (Figure 3). In separate experiments, we changed the potential to shift the composition to 68% La and 32% Pr.The ability to concentrate, or selectively extract rare earth metals directly from a mixture of oxides in an environmentally benign solution (ionic liquid), could potentially replace the very laborious solvent extraction processes which produce oxide or carbonate species. We envision that our technology has potentially multiple insertion points into rare earth mining processes. Future work will focus on developing and optimizing these methods to result in a high efficiency process for rare earth metal recovery.AcknowledgementsThis work was accomplished with support from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) under contract no. N00014-13-P-1139.

The GSRC's Role in Meeting Tomorrow's Design Challenges

In the late 1990s, the US Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) established a joint research program with the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) through the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), known as the Focus Center Research Program. One of these FCRP centers is the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC), whose focus is on the systems architecture and design aspects of electronics technology. The research of the GSRC is of great value to the US Department of Defense, since design remains an important challenge for DoD systems. This partnership is an excellent example of government and industry collaboration on precompetitive research of common interest and benefit.

10.4.0 Panel 10.4.0: U.S. OSD Systems of Systems Engineering Guide: Status Report & INCOSE Support

AbstractIn May 2006, a task was issued by the U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology (DUSD (A&T)) to develop a Systems of Systems Engineering Guidebook. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) convened a small group of Government, Industry and Academia, and selected the Stevens Institute of Technology to lead the project. During the summer and autumn of 2006, the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) was honored to be invited to provide a global representation of the systems engineering community in support of the OSD writing of a Systems of Systems, Systems Engineering (SoS SE) Guide.On 22 December 2006 the draft SoS SE Guide, version 0.9, was released for review and use by the systems engineering community. Industry and academia have been asked to submit their comments as part of the effort to pilot the recommendations in the Guide. In 2007, OSD has been actively engaging a sample of DoD SoS programs to pilot the Guide, especially with respect to the 16 OSD SE processes. The responses will become part of the first update to the Guide.At this panel, OSD will present the background and motivation for writing the Guide, along with an update on the pilot. Both OSD and INCOSE will discuss their insights. As part of the broad SE community review, the Guide will also be viewed from the UK perspective of Capabilities Based Acquisition. Looking to the future, the concepts and practices of Net Centricity, Network Enablement of Capabilities, and Semantic Web will be considered and how they might be more deeply integrated into future versions of the Guide. This panel will provide opportunities for INCOSE to continue to work with OSD and collaborate on SoS SE.

Spiral evolution applied to legacy avionics systems

The US Department of Defense (DoD), through the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), has determined that evolutionary acquisition is their strategy of choice for future software-intensive systems, and that the spiral development model (SDM) is the preferred method/process for software-intensive development life cycles. Electronic Systems Command (ESC) at Hanscom AFB, Massachusetts, has written a draft handbook on the use of Spiral Development for all future Command and Control (C2) systems, including reference to the DoD 5000 series and Air Force Program Directive 63-1, Acquisition System, which deploys this OSD mandate for future C2 systems. Barry Boehm's continued work on SDM which he conceived in the 1980s, is heavily biased toward development of new systems that are software-intensive, as noted in a workshop he gave at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 2000.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy, 1957-1960, and: The Chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1949-1999 (review)

As long ago as the 1950s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) began to document their own evolution in a series of historical studies. Intended for internal use, presumably by staffers seeking an overall picture of the institution or of where it had stood on some issue, the histories parallel those that have been published in recent years about the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). Like the OSD histories, those that cover the JCS attempt to analyse the most prominent military issues of the day and sketch the contributions of the Joint Chiefs toward resolution of those issues, while also outlining the evolution of the institution itself. In this pair of volumes, the Fairchild and Poole book is the latest entry in the joint history saga, while the second volume is something of a hybrid, a sketch of the role of the JCS chairman, about which more presently.

Joint Logistics Over the Shore Operations in Rough Seas

ABSTRACT Joint Logistics Over the Shore (JLOTS) operations involve the unloading of ships without the benefit of fixed port facilities. Container ships, roll‐on/roll‐off (Ro/Ro) ships, break bulk ships, heavy lift ships, and tankers are the most common merchant vessels utilized in JLOTS operations to transport military cargo. A major problem is that the current JLOTS system is inoperative in sea state 3 and greater conditions. When seas build above sea state 3 the motion and relative motion of lighters and ships create extremely dangerous conditions which preclude the movement of cargo. New technology is currently being developed by the Navy, Army, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to improve JLOTS operations. Several new JLOTS subsystems were recently tested as part of an Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) sponsored joint services test and evaluation program called JLOTS III (June 1993). JLOTS III showed that lighters, cargo transfer systems, and personnel do not have the capability or training to perform in sea state 3, as currently required by military doctrine. Subsequent to the JLOTS III testing, a number of R & D innovations have been examined and a Heavy Weather (Sea State 3) JLOTS Options Study has been completed. This options study has defined and characterized all the weak links related to heavy weather operations and has identified and/or developed concepts to improve the overall JLOTS operational efficiency. This paper discusses current JLOTS technology development initiatives from a joint services perspective with regard to the following question: Can emerging technology, in combination with improved training and command and control, provide a heavy weather JLOTS capability which is affordable?

Human Resource Implications of Structural Changes in OSD

Recommendations to change the structure of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) have been offered in the Staff Report to the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate (1985) and the Final Report by the President's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management (1986). Both reports pay little attention to the human implications of structural change. This paper argues that incentives are an important mediator between people and structure. Also, the preferred management style of key leaders needs to fit the organization structure. The Blue Ribbon (Packard) Commission recommendations appear compatible with current incentives and values. However, the Staff Report has major implications requiring changes in job designs and management styles in OSD.

DOD's Office of International Security Affairs: The Brief Ascendancy of an Advisory System

Foreign policy and national security advisory systems for the president and secretary of state have been given careful treatment in a number of studies. ' Foreign policy advisory staffs for the secretary of defense, however, have received scant attention. Until changes made in 1979 by the Carter administration, the defense secretary's foreign policy advisory and general policy development staff was the Office of International Security Affairs (ISA), part of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). One of the reasons for its relative obscurity in the literature is that after the Johnson administration, ISA's influence declined dramatically. This article examines the factors that enhanced or diminished the influence of ISA. As the current administration struggles with the problems of foreign policy management, the experience of one cabinet-level advisory agency offers a better understanding of what has been effective. From the Truman through the Carter administrations, ISA filled two very different functions. It was a line agency,2 administering the Defense Depart-

COMBATANT CAPABILITY—A NEW DIMENSION IN SHIP DESIGN

ABSTRACTThe traditional approach to ship design involved a recognized sequence of design steps, usually identified as preliminary, contract, and detail design. The first two resulted in a naval architectural ship definition and a list of specified equipments. These provided firm constraint on the third step. Not explicitly or quantitatively addressed was the reason for a warship's existence, its combatant capability in the actual environment. The frequently addressed technical excellence required to produce a ship design is needed in full measure today. Added to the task is a much more sharply defined set of contracts, within the Navy between the technical and operational communities, and externally among the Navy and the hierarchy of review and approval represented by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Congress. An understanding of this new drum beat and capability to march to it are prime requirements for the Navy's survival. A significant measure of the Navy's effectiveness is the number of ships which we can acquire within expected shipbuilding budget allocations and within cost ceilings and performance floors of “design to cost.” We have made progress in developing a method to assess combatant capability and effect design trade relationships versus top‐level requirements. This paper discusses the need for this new dimension in design. Companion papers will develop the technical rationale and methodology of the simulation which makes possible the capability.