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Future Air Force Projects

Overview

This page provides an overview of the future capabilities of interest to the United States Air Force.  These concepts represent the possible ways the Air Force will operate into the future – these are the future of warfare and how the Air Force will combat it!

Development Planning (DP): DP supports the tradespace evaluation of emerging capability needs, includes system-of-systems assessments, identifies and assesses technology maturity and risk drivers, and incorporates comprehensive life-cycle planning contributing to a high confidence acquisition program launch. DP brings its greatest leverage prior to the Materiel Development Decision (MDD) and MSA. The FY13 and FY14 DP Projects are currently underway; and FY15 DP Projects are in planning.

DP includes analytically-based, decision-quality assessments, studies, strategies, and options in pursuit of new capabilities. Key aspects of DP include analytic support for identification of needs and development of requirements for potential materiel solutions; initiation of high confidence acquisition programs via early systems engineering; early test and evaluation strategy development; technology and manufacturing maturity; assessments of life-cycle analyses, lifecycle cost estimates, and early acquisition intelligence engagement. DP is accomplished in collaboration with other AF and DoD processes (e.g., requirements generation, Science and Technology (S&T), SE, acquisition security, Human Systems Integration (HSI), Intelligence Supportability, and Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE)).

As Development Planning (DP) provides the engineering analysis and technical planning activities that provide the foundation for informed investment decisions, it is necessary to have a robust and repeatable process to reliably accomplish this.  To that end, AFLCMC developed the “AFLCMC Standard Process for Development Planning”.

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