Innovative Support Alternatives to Reduce Overall Weapon System Life Cycle Cost

Abstract

Defense budget decreases in recent years with increasingly complex weapon systems and component equipment has mandated innovative support solutions to control costs. Automatic Test Systems (ATS) have been standardized by service branch in an effort to control the costs of support for support equipment. Support contracts with the ATS provider for repair services leveraged repair volume to reduce cost per repair. Support contracts where the ATS provider also supplies loaner spares used centralized wholesale spares systems to reduce retail spares requirements. Commitment to aggressive turnaround times for repairs reduced wholesale spares requirements. Entrusting the ATS provider with hardware configuration management improved system availability by allowing design improvements to address bad actor concerns. Industry has shown that the next logical step in the progression is leased support equipment, where system configuration management including both hardware and software configuration is entrusted to the ATS provider. The ATS OEM has unique knowledge about the hardware and software interactions in the system that allow efficient resolution of availability detractors like false alarms. The OEM understands instrument peculiarities allowing increasingly efficient fault detection and isolation. The costs associated with the improvements will be spread across the installed base so that each customer benefits from the increased availability, whether they have one system or hundreds. The unique requirements associated with leased equipment in a military operating environment will be explored. These steps explore only the horizontal axis of test, where the vertical axis includes all layers of test, such as design verification test, factory test, acceptance test, qualification test, at-platform maintenance test and off-platform maintenance test. The potential savings by reuse along the vertical axis include ATS and Test Programs Set (TPS) components. The factory test, acceptance test and off-platform performance test requirements are often very similar, if not exactly the same. The unique requirements associated with TPS reuse in a military environment will be explored.