Military Acquisition Program Management, Department of Defense

>> My name is Mercedes Fitchett, and I'm in Acquisition Program Management, U.S. Air Force, at The Pentagon. Acquisition Program Management basically involves the development of the weapons systems that the Department uses. So it includes career fields such as contracting, systems engineering, testing, business, and finance information assurance and program management. And program management is the career field within acquisition in which I'm in. A busy day has lots of meetings with other parts of The Pentagon, mostly including our finance and comptroller offices. We also do a lot of management with our acquisition centers out in the field, and we also conduct a lot of financial analysis, so that we're effectively using U.S. Air Force dollars across all the weapons systems. We do have over $100 billion in research and development and procurement funds. As you can imagine, in this time of sequester, it's really important to make sure that the money is where it's most needed. So acquisition is very much like product development. You first have an idea. You see that there is a capability gap. So in defense, for example, it may be a new-generation long-range bomber that's going to fly a longer distance. So you have this capability gap, and then you actually develop different types of prototypes that may get you there. So you will contract out to different defense groups such as Boeing or Raytheon, or Northrop Grumman, and they will have contracts to develop these prototypes, and then you will compete these prototypes against one another, and you'll do a down select, and then you'll engage in initial production, and if testing/user acceptance goes well, you'll actually go into full-rate production and then deployment to the field for the war fighter.