Defense Acquisition Trends, 2015

January 26, 2016

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Acquisition, Budgets, Force Structure, and Strategy all have critical distinctions and underlying interlinkages. The new CSIS initiative, Defense Outlook: A CSIS Series on Strategy, Budget, Forces, and Acquisition, aims to better explain each element of the continuum by better understanding the way they enable and limit one another. This report, Defense Acquisition Trends, 2015: Acquisition in the Era of Budgetary Uncertainty, the first of the series also represents a rebirth of the CSIS series on Defense Contract Trends. As before, the report relies significantly on empirical analysis undergirded by contracting transaction data from the open-source Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), which formed the crux of the analysis in that series of reports. This edition continues the approach of identifying and studying emergent trends in the contracting data and marries that analysis with discussion of changing goals and methods for the larger acquisition system.