Assessing the Reliability of the Future Years Defense Program and Building a Forecast

Abstract

Discerning, negotiating, and communicating priorities are necessary tasks for the U.S. defense acquisition system to effectively implement its portion of the National Defense Strategy. One of the Department of Defense’s central tools for doing so is the Future Years Defense Plan (FYDP), a projection of the cost and composition of the force over the next 5 years. This project created a dataset and employs it to study FYDP reliability, focusing on two sources of uncertainty: differences in approach between military departments and differences in volatility between those line items in the base budget and those that include contingency operation spending.