2005 Annual Report - Acquisition Research Program

The operating forces of the US military have a long history of looking to the past for lessons learned when developing strategies for the future. The challenge is to meld these lessons learned with evolving technology and world events to produce a coherent and executable framework for success for future military operations. In achieving this end state, the process followed is important. The emerging strategy should be developed in a free and open forum that invites innovation and debate while maintaining intellectual rigor. An approach such as this would also be of value to the business processes of the DOD. Specifically, the DOD acquisition system would benefit from an ongoing dialogue among practitioners, scholars and students of the process. The faculty of the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy (GSBPP) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is particularly well positioned to make a major contribution to such a dialogue. Additionally, the students enrolled in the MBA program stand to gain immensely from participation in these discussions via their MBA projects