Today, new and frequent mission changes are fueling the increasing costs for both goods and services. At the same time, there is little doubt that the DoD will see significant budget cuts in the coming years. Given these conditions, the DoD must reorient its priorities so that it is able to acquire essential systems in the required quantities.
In a resource-constrained environment, the unit cost determines the quantity of systems that can be acquired. We contend that the DoD should make unit cost a contract requirement and,therefore, a critical design requirement. Moreover, we believe that, in addition to schedule and performance, cost should be explicitly represented within the trade space; rather than merely designing to cost, program leadership would have the flexibility to trade higher performance for lower costs provided that the objectives of the program were maintained.