Digging Out the Root Cause: Nunn-McCurdy Breaches in Major Defense Acquisition Programs

Abstract

Continuing concern over defense acquisition has led Congress to direct the establishment of an office in the Department of Defense to oversee the conduct of root cause analyses on programs that have incurred Nunn-McCurdy breaches. This paper focuses on one such program. RAND analysis of several programs with Nunn-McCurdy breaches reveals they share several common causes. However, each program is different, and those differences suggest that policymakers should be wary of applying policies that assume all program cost increases stem from common causes.