29th Annual Test & Evaluation Conference

Introduction

As we exceed a decade of persistent armed conflict, we find ourselves confronted with an era of unprecedented technical and financial challenges. Former Defense Secretary Gates referred to the gravity of its impact on the Department of Defense during the waning days of his leadership as “extreme fiscal duress.”

The Test and Evaluation (T&E) community must redouble its efforts to provide the warfighter with “no doubt” products and systems that are effective, suitable, and survivable. Perhaps the only way to achieve this is to return to basics and challenge how we’ve come to meet our T&E objectives under these circumstances. In his white paper, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey, asserted that we must “rededicate [ourselves] to the profession of arms” and continue “to learn, to understand, and to promote the knowledge, skills, attributes, and behaviors that define us as a profession.”

As a body, the T&E community, joining forces with systems engineers, have the opportunity to serve a vital role in shaping the joint force of the future. With a primary responsibility to the warfighter and accountability to the American people, we need to continue to deploy creative and innovative methods and techniques to help maintain our military’s decisive edge. We must continue to sustain our global dominance in military systems through applying best practices, efficiencies, productivity, and innovation anywhere they can be found. As available funding levels change, so must we. The T&E community must continue to closely collaborate with our collective defense industry communities, maximizing our available resources. To borrow from Winston Churchill, “…we have run out of money, now we have to think.” Adequate T&E funding and other resources will almost certainly be supplanted by extreme technological creativity and well-thought T&E integration that will yield best-value as well as the effectiveness attained during more prosperous times.

Thoughtful, forward-looking T&E is a vital means to reduce acquisition lifecycle costs. In recent years, this conference has focused on how increased T&E efficiencies and productivity could be realized through cooperative integrated testing, design of experiments, modeling and simulation, early discovery of failure modes, better capital utilization, and keeping decision makers fully informed.

These tenets are no less important today. However, our recent challenges have caused us to search deep within all of us and reflect on our ability to mount a dominating fighting force in traditional terms of fast-paced technology and hardware with little or no fiscal constraints. Our traditional testing, evaluating, and assessment of operational effectiveness, suitability, and survivability is evolving in lockstep with the more fiscally constrained directions taken by the warfighting technologists and developers. The spectrum of warfare, threats, and organizational environments they consider now is vastly expanded and multi-layered in order to be more cost-effective. For example, samplings of some new considerations for T&E are:

--Integrated test and evaluation across multiple levels of warfare
--Testing in joint organizational environments
--Testing for reliability 
--Testing systems-of-systems
--Information assurance/information inter-operability testing 
--Testing and evaluating non-lethal products and systems
--Enhancing the value of limited developmental and operational testing 
--Balancing modeling and simulation with live testing
--Validity of models, simulations, and T&E methods when compared to lessons learned from actual combat data 
--Evaluating operational reliability throughout the T&E cycle
--Product life cycle T&E techniques

The 29th Annual National T&E Conference will focus on adapting T&E’s vital defense role in an era of unprecedented challenges. This conference calls for and will select papers that exhibit a commitment to carrying out a T&E mission to shape a post-conflict, fighting force of the future under the most challenging circumstances. And in doing so, demonstrates a thoughtful and creative consideration for existing and emerging threats which challenge our warfighters now and in the future.