The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) yesterday released its FY2021 DOT&E Annual Report to Congress. This in-depth and comprehensive report addresses dozens of programs, and is well worth reading, both from an individual program perspective, as well as from a more broadly-based, overarching perspective.

From both a systems/sustaining engineering and life cycle logistics perspective, several common themes relating to reliability, availability, maintainability, and suitability are worth noting. The reported stated, for example, that “…in FY21, DOT&E assessed approximately half of programs to be operationally suitable without any caveats, a trend that has been relatively consistent since FY16. Suitability shortfalls were spread across Human System Integration (HSI), reliability, availability, and safety. Most notably, 80 percent of programs that assessed human factors reported HSI deficiencies. The most common causes of degraded HSI were training deficiencies resulting from incomplete or inaccurate documentation, poor usability, and high workload. Operators and maintainers frequently reported that they would benefit from additional hands-on training. Fifty percent of reports that included a determination on reliability found that the system was reliable enough to support the mission without caveats. Reliability shortfalls resulted from both hardware and software deficiencies. A larger percentage of reports found systems to be maintainable (71 percent) and available (77 percent) without caveats.”