Estimating Middle Tier Acquisition Schedule Risk

Abstract

Congress recently created Middle Tier Acquisition (MTA) programs, which provide the military services rapid prototyping and fielding pathways with new program flexibilities and an explicit schedule constraint. The services are executing multiple MTAs, resulting in a set of MTA experiments related to development, execution, and governance. There is little published information on MTA performance; we use public data to quantify planned schedules. We introduce a quantified schedule risk measure based on Monte Carlo simulations. The simulations provide insights into MTA programs’ schedule risk and program performance relative to a statistically based reference.