The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (OSD-ATL) is assessing the state of practice for Mission Analysis and the new Mission Engineering. We believe industry has a perspective to offer in this area and can offer some ways to increase industry involvement informing the government in Mission Analysis and Mission Engineering of enterprise improvements.
Per OSD (ATL), Mission Engineering is "the deliberate planning, analyzing, organizing, and integrating of current and emerging operational and system capabilities to achieve desired warfighting mission effects." The difference between mission engineering and mission analysis is that the new mission engineering goes beyond mission analysis and focuses on actions to design or adapt systems of systems to meet the mission outcomes, hence the "planning, analyzing, organizing, and integrating" of current and emerging operational and system capabilities. Therefore, mission engineering includes but goes beyond traditional mission analysis to drive the systems (and Systems of Systems) engineering.
As a result, a core team with representatives from the National Defense Industrial Association Systems Engineering (NDIA SE) Division, the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Military Operations Research Society (MORS) have joined together to solicit information from industry through this survey. The survey consists of three parts: (1) Demographics, (2) Information on Mission Analysis, and (3) Information on Mission Engineering. It is believed that most organizations conduct mission analysis and that mission analysis is a foundation for mission engineering. As a result, questions on mission analysis will be asked first followed be questions on mission engineering.
The survey should take no more than 30 minutes to complete and is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/V57982V. The survey will be open through Monday April 18th.
Thank you in advance for participating. If you have any questions, please contact the survey POCs Kirk Michealson at kirk.michealson@gmail.com and Greg Parnell at gparnell@uark.edu.