Commercial-off-the shelf (COTS): a challenge to military equipment reliability

Commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) military equipment offers the promise of technology advancement, low cost and reduced acquisition time. Unfortunately, it also offers the opportunity for a reliability and logistics disaster because commercial parts, standards, and practices may not meet military requirements. Additionally, commercial vendors have little or no experience in providing the kind of technical data required to support military deployment logistics. COTS hardware is expected to have the following characteristics: low cost; currently available from multiple suppliers; and built to documented standards in high volume production with a mature design. The reliability challenge in the next decade will be to manage COTS to take advantage of the promise and avoid the disaster. This can be done by carefully selecting the COTS vendors, thoroughly testing the hardware/software and applying only those analyses and data requirements (ESS, EQT, verification testing, prediction, FMEA, derating, parts control and FRACAS/FRB) to ensure reliability performance and logistics support. This paper offers some guidance in managing COTS program elements and provides insight into their impact on reliability.