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Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment (2006)

Chapter: Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
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APPENDIX E
Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff

VIJAY NAIR (Chair) is the Donald A. Darling professor of statistics and professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan. He has been chair of the Department of Statistics since 1998. He was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories for 15 years before joining the faculty at Michigan. His area of expertise is engineering statistics, including quality and productivity improvement, experimental design, reliability, and process control. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He is a former editor of Technometrics and International Statistical Review and has served on many other editorial boards. He is currently the chair of the board of trustees of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and a member of the Committee on National Statistics at the National Research Council (NRC). He has been a member of several NRC panels, including the Panel on Statistical Methods for Testing and Evaluating Defense Systems and the Assessment Panel on NIST’s Information Technology Center. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley.


SETH BONDER is the founder of Vector Research, Incorporated, and was chairman/chief executive officer until 2001. The firm provides analysis and information technology services to national security, health care delivery, and financial enterprises in the public and private sectors. His area of

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
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expertise in the field of systems, policy, and operations analysis is the development of new procedures and their application to defense and health care enterprises. He has advised senior management in the Department of Defense and defense industries, including various secretariats, service chiefs of staff, commanders of unified commands, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He has recently worked on studies to enhance the protection of U.S. military forces overseas against terrorist attacks and to restructure Army forces to improve their capability and versatility to perform a broader spectrum of missions over the next two decades. He is a member of the U.S. Army Science Board and a past president of the Military Operations Research Society. He is an INFORMS fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering (operations research) from Ohio State University.


JOHN D. CHRISTIE is a senior fellow at the Logistics Management Institute with an extensive background in defense acquisition policy and program analysis. From 1989 to 1993, he served as director of acquisition policy and program integration for the under secretary of defense (acquisition), directing the preparation of a comprehensive revision to all defense acquisition policies and procedures. While there he also prepared comprehensive acquisition program alternatives for the secretary of defense that resulted in multibillion dollar budget reductions. As a member of the Army Science Board in the 1980s, he directed a review of all Army analytical community and operations research activities that supported the overall Army acquisition process and its integration with the programming and budgeting process. In the 1990s he served on the staff of the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces that provided recommendations to improve defense management. He was a member of the Panel on Statistical Methods for Testing and Evaluating Defense Systems of the Committee on National Statistics. He has S.B., S.M., E.M.E., and Sc.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in mechanical engineering.


MICHAEL L. COHEN (Study Director) is a senior program officer for the Committee on National Statistics. He previously assisted the Panel on Estimates of Poverty for Small Geographic Areas and directed the Panel on Statistical Methods for Testing and Evaluating Defense Systems. Formerly, he was a mathematical statistician at the Energy Information Administration, an assistant professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
×

of Maryland, and a visiting lecturer in statistics at Princeton University. His general area of research is the use of statistics in public policy, with particular interest in the census undercount, model validation, and robust estimation. A fellow of the American Statistical Association, he has a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in statistics from Stanford University.


ARTHUR FRIES is a staff member and project leader at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), where he has been employed since 1982. His recent work experience there includes leading studies on such topics as operational test and evaluation of antiarmor defense systems for the director of operational test and evaluation, validation of operational test and evaluation simulation models, counternarcotics strategies and data trends for the Department of Defense and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and counterterrorism strategies and technology assessments for the Department of Homeland Security. His statistical research interests include minimum aberration designs, properties of the inverse Gaussian distribution in application to fatigue modeling and experimental design, and reliability growth methodologies. He served as a member of the NRC’s Committee on Commercial Aviation Security. He has published widely in numerous journals, including Technometrics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Statistics & Probability Letters, and the IEEE Transactions on Reliability. In 1999, he was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has an M.A. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in statistics, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


STEPHEN POLLOCK is Herrick emeritus professor of manufacturing and professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research interests are in mathematical modeling, operations research, and Bayesian decision theoretic methods. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a former member of the U.S. Army Science Board (1994-1999), he was a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics, the Panel on Statistical Methods for Testing and Evaluating Defense Systems of the Committee on National Statistics and he also chaired the Panel on Operational Test Design and Evaluation of the Interim Armored Vehicle. In addition to his career at the University of Michigan, he spent four years at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. He has S.M. and Ph.D.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
×

degrees in physics and operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


JESSE H. POORE holds the Ericsson/Harlan D. Mills chair in software engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. He is also director of the University of Tennessee–Oak Ridge National Labs Science Alliance, a program to promote and stimulate joint research between the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Labs, in order to manage joint programs and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations. He conducts research in cleanroom software engineering and teaches software engineering courses. He has held academic appointments at Florida State University and Georgia Tech; he has served as a National Science Foundation rotator, worked in the Executive Office of the President, and was executive director of the Committee on Science and Technology in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a member of NRC’s Panel on Statistical Methods for Testing and Evaluating Defense Systems. He has a Ph.D. in information and computer science from Georgia Tech.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
×
Page 61
Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
×
Page 62
Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
×
Page 63
Suggested Citation:"Appendix E: Biographical Sketches of Oversight Committee and Staff." National Research Council. 2006. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/11575.
×
Page 64
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The Department of Defense (DoD) recently adopted evolutionary acquisition, a dynamic strategy for the development and acquisition of its defense systems. Evolutionary defense systems are planned, in advance, to be developed through several stages in a single procurement program. Each stage is planned to produce a viable system which could be fielded. The system requirements for each stage of development may be specified in advance of a given stage or may be decided at the outset of that stage's development. Due to the different stages that comprise an evolutionary system, there exists a need for careful reexamination of current testing and evaluation policies and processes, which were designed for single-stage developments.

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (USD-AT&L) and the Director of Operational Testing and Evaluation (DOT&E) asked the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) of the National Academies to examine the key issues and implications for defense testing from the introduction of evolutionary acquisition. The CNSTAT was charged with planning and conducting a workshop to study test strategies for the evolutionary acquisition. The committee reviewed defense materials defining evolutionary acquisition and interviewed test officials from the three major test service agencies to understand the current approaches used in testing systems procured through evolutionary acquisition. The committee also examined possible alternatives to identify problems in implementation.

At the workshop that took place on December 13-14, 2004, the committee tried to answer many questions including: What are the appropriate roles and objectives for testing in an evolutionary environment?, Can a systematic, disciplined process be developed for testing and evaluation in such a fluid and flexible environment?, and Is there adequate technical expertise within the acquisition community to fully exploit data gathered from previous stages to effectively combine information from various sources for test design and analysis?. Testing of Defense Systems in an Evolutionary Acquisition Environment provides the conclusions and recommendations of the CNSTAT following the workshop and its other investigations.

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