A Capability Engineering Lifecycle Framework Based on Insights from Australian Defence

Abstract The Australian Department of Defence is actively pursuing initiatives to improve the integration and interoperability of the defence force and this paper reports on research findings produced in support of this effort. The paper opens with a description of the Australian Defence capability development context together with recent initiatives to provide greater military capability for the available budget. Within this context, the problem the researchers set out to address is how best to co‐ordinate the ongoing force Integration and Interoperability (I2) activities that evolve and deliver defence capabilities so that these capabilities can be integrated together at short notice and deployed. System of Systems Engineering (SoSE) approaches have been found to be effective for this class of problem and the paper provides a short review of the most promising candidates. The methodology needs analysis that follows concludes that a range of different SoS approaches will be needed to cover the different stages of the capability lifecycle and the paper then proceeds to describe an initial framework that provides a new way of looking at the defence Integrated Capability Realisation (ICR) SoSE challenge across two dimensions. The first dimension is the time horizon of the planned capability increment: from the present to around four years; four to eight years; eight to twelve years; and longer than twelve years. The second dimension covers the types of activities that are traditionally performed to evolve defence forces such as future force planning, program co‐ordination and planning, project capability definition, acquisition, and force generation. The paper describes how this framework provides a simple method to identify which SoSE approaches are the most applicable to given ICR subtasks and also proposes an overall approach to self‐organise overall Defence ICR efforts