A proposed reorganization of test and evaluation for Naval aircraft weapons systems

Abstract

This thesis evaluates the Navy's test and evaluation (T&E) process for aircraft weapon systems, identifies problems, and proposes a reorganization of the Navy's T&E agencies. Many changes have been made to Improve the T&E process, but some of these have resulted in costly inefficiencies. Contributing problems include: the Navy's "independent" test agency being tasked more on the basis of its apparent independence than on its testing expertise, lack of actual independence of the many test agencies, excessive testing duplication, inadequate testing expertise, lack of operational test objectives, inadequate test planning, lack of a weapon system T&E school, and numerous T&E management problems.