Originally Posted by
ShotOne
Most of your posts, PDR, seem to be very logical but it simply doesn't follow that an expensive procurement process is necessarily linked to technical advance. On the contrary, there are instances of the procurement process taking so long that the equipment is obsolete before it even enters service!
Who said anything about an "expensive procurement process"? I'm simply talking about the trade-off decision to meet a particular need with off-the-shelf vs developmental items. Nor am I suggesting that COTS (or more often "MOTS") is inherently a "bad" idea. I'm just pointing out that when looking at things to integrate into an aircraft system there are risks and issues which are often not full appreciated, especially by project managers and procurement authorities (hence the final line of my main post "If all the above issues and risks can be identified, quantified and managed then COTS approach may well be a viable solution").
You can find examples all over the place - possibly one of the most obvious being when the UK decided not to buy the "OTS" P-40 (which was totally unsuited to our mission) and instead contracted for the development of the P-51 (so it could be designed AROUND our mission).
If you are really, really lucky you may find a piece of OTS equipment that meets every single line of your requirement spec. In theory it can happen, but in >30years in the military aircraft industry I've never seen it. So when you buy COTS/MOTS you either trade the requirements it *doesn't* meet or you have it modified until it does. Modified COTS is just fundamentally a bad idea which is bound to be expensive, risky and unsupportable - it can be done and sometimes you strike it lucky but it's rare. Traded requirements should always restrict some aspect of the mission or increase some aspect of the ownership risk/cost (assuming the requirements were properly established) - otherwise the requirement didn't need to be there. These things are self-evident.
Nobody is suggesting that buying kids toys is a good idea, as in the walkie-talkie example. But there are many robust and capable handheld radios in widespread use. Insisting that ours be designed to order would seem to be a good example of wasteful procurement.
In the walkie-talkie example - if there are OTS items that meet the requirement then you can obviously buy it. Walkie talkies don't have much of an integration need at the technical level. But of course these days they will all include microprocessor-based systems, and these microprocessors will be obsolescent within 5 years (you won't be able to buy any spares). The manufacturer may offer an upgrade to a new processor, but that will need different test systems and test code, and will invalidate (say) the EMC or APEX qualification. It also means that you will have a mixture of configurations in service so you either have to bin the old ones or manage the different spare parts, repair procedures, test systems etc.
Have you tried getting a spare screen or battery for (say) a five-year-old smartphone? Have you tried to replace the processor in a 5-year-old laptop?
You will get similar problems with developmental kit, but it will be longer before it happens because the components used will be the latest at the time of procurement, not "already several years old" at that time.
James V Jones (Texan former tank officer who became one of the gurus in through-life engineering) used to lecture on this sort of thing, and he said that Rand had analysed procurement histories of all US government procurements <above some value that I can't remember> and one of their findings was that they couldn't find a SINGLE "modified COTS" procurement which ended up being cheaper than the developmental alternative. I don't have the study reference (it may be in the boxes of study notes in my loft, but I'm not looking for it!), but thousands of people attended those lectures over the years, so there should be others who remember it.
PDR