Conclusion 3.1: Major advances can be realized by applying selected industrial principles and practices in restructuring the paradigm for operational testing and the associated information gathering and evaluation process in the development of military systems.

Recommendation 3.1: Congress and the Department of Defense should broaden the objective of operational testing to improve its contribution to the defense acquisition process. The primary mandate of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation should be to integrate operational testing into the overall system development process to provide as much information as possible as soon as possible on operational effectiveness and suitability. In this way, improvements to the system and decisions about continuing system development or passing to full-rate production can be made in a timely and cost-efficient manner.

Recommendation 3.2: Operational evaluations should address the overall performance of a defense system and its ability to meet its broadly stated mission goals. When a system is tested against detailed requirements, these requirements should be shown to contribute to necessary performance factors of the system as a whole.

Recommendation 3.3: The Department of Defense and the military services, using common financial resources, should develop a centralized testing and operational evaluation data archive for use in test design and test evaluation.

Recommendation 3.4: All services should explore the adoption of the use of small-scale testing similar to the Army concept of force development test and experimentation.