Law Commons^™

Taming The Hurricane Of Acquisition Cost Growth – Or At Least Predicting It, Allen J. Deneve, Erin T. Ryan, Jonathan D. Ritschel, Christine M. Schubert Kabban

Faculty Publications

Cost growth is a persistent adversary to efficient budgeting in the Department of Defense. Despite myriad studies to uncover causes of this cost growth, few of the proposed remedies have made a meaningful impact. A key reason may be that DoD cost estimates are formulated using the highly unrealistic assumption that a program’s current baseline characteristics will not change in the future. Using a weather forecasting analogy, the authors demonstrate how a statistical approach may be used to account for these inevitable baseline changes and identify related cost growth trends. These trends are then used to reduce the error in …