Case Study of Acquisition Reform : Brigade Combat Team, the Vanguard for Army Transformation

This thesis is a case study of the Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV) for the US Army Brigade Combat Team (BCT) and the application of acquisition reform and accelerated acquisition. This thesis identified the acquisition reform initiatives that were applied to develop and procure an ACAT ID major weapon system within 16 months. In 1999, the Army Chief of Staff, GEN Shinseki, stated his vision for a transformed Army that would be based on a lighter, more lethal, faster deployable, and highly mobile force that could arrive anywhere in the world within 96 hours. Centered on the procurement of six brigades of IAVs, each brigade contains a measured mix of 10 combat and combat support vehicles based on a nearly common platform. The BCT procurement of IAVs is the interim solution and is a vanguard to the Army's transformation. The culmination of the transformation will be the Objective Force, scheduled to be operational in the year 2020. The IAV procurement, therefore, was not intended as a developmental program but an integration of existing off-the-shelf capabilities that balanced cost, schedule, and performance in the best available vehicle system. The procurement relied on multiple acquisition reform means to accelerate the requirements development, and solicitation, to enable the delivery of the best available product to the Army. The initiatives employed to make this award form the primary research question, "What has been the impact of DoD acquisition reform on the development of the Brigade Combat Team?"Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA is the author of 'Case Study of Acquisition Reform : Brigade Combat Team, the Vanguard for Army Transformation', published 2001 under ISBN 9781423527565 and ISBN 1423527569.