One of the primary goals of any major acquisition program is to achieve the best possible balance between performance, risk, schedule, and cost. Early consideration of life cycle cost and manpower, personnel and training (MPT) issues is critical to the achievement of this objective. Historically, operating and support (O&S) and MPT support requirements have not been adequately considered during the early phases of weapon system development. Consequently, O&S requirements have become the unaltered by-products of initial engineering decisions and in some cases have become a logistics support/MPT burden on the user community.

This paper presents one promising technique for the incorporation of O&S forecasts into the engineering requirements analysis process. This design to ownership approach requires concurrent and Interdependent front end analysis. O&S predictions are generated by economic modeling of baseline and new system concepts. These early O&S forecasts lead to the generation of engineering design approaches and specific design rules to offset future support requirements.