In case you hadn’t seen it already, the US Army issued important new policy on April 28th when it published Army Regulation 702-19 entitled Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability. In a nutshell, “this regulation prescribes Department of the Army policies and responsibilities for the reliability, availability and maintainability of its materiel. This policy implements key provisions of the DoD Directive 5000.01 and DoD Instruction 5000.02.” In so doing, it “sets forth policies for planning and managing Army materiel systems’ reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) during development, procurement, deployment, and sustainment. It applies to all combat or mission essential developmental, non-developmental, commercial items adapted for military use, and product improved hardware and software systems. Materiel systems also include but are not limited to stand-alone or embedded automatic data processing equipment hardware and software; support and ancillary equipment comprising the total materiel system; and multi-Service materiel systems when the Army is lead Service.” Check it out.