A Method for Selecting Affordable System Concepts: A Case Application to Naval Ship Design

The current defense acquisition environment includes much uncertainty regarding future budgets, political developments, and global geopolitical events. With affordability of systems now mandated by the US Department of Defense, it is imperative to ensure that future acquisitions will be feasible from their inception given resource considerations, and can remain feasible given various future perturbations of those resources. This paper introduces a method for early conceptual development (inception) of major defense systems and demonstrates the method's application to a case study of a hypothetical naval ship acquisition. The results of the application and the implications of the method for system development are discussed.