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The Cots revolution.
While the general market for defence products is shrinking, one area faces a market growth in double digits. Even before 11 September 2001, the market for embedded commercial off-the-shelf (Cots) technology was growing at more than ten per cent per year. Some observers expect this rate to increase, and even to double.
In the mid-1990s, Britain's Royal Navy needed a small laser printer for use in nuclear submarines, at the same time the author of this article needed a small laser printer for office use. Both requirements were met by the purchase of the Hewlett Packard Laser Jet 6P. The office printer sits on a small trolley close to the desk, but in RN service the unit was securely mounted in a metal frame that prevented it from suffering the angle and dangle effects of submarine manoeuvres, vibration or shock. On 29 June 1994, US Defense Secretary William J Perry issued a memorandum `Specifications & Standards--A New Way of Doing Business'. This restated his belief that greater use of performance and commercial specifications and standards was the most important action that the Department of Defense should take in future procurement. "Performance specifications shall be used when purchasing new systems, major modifications, upgrades to current systems and non-developmental and commercial items for programs in any acquisition category. If it is not practicable to use a performance specification, a non-government standard shall be used." In cases where there was no acceptable non-governmental standard or were the use of a performance specification or non-government standard would not be cost effective, "the use of military specifications and standards is authorized as a last resort, with an appropriate waiver". Although Perry's action is widely credited as the birth of the Cots, in practice the acronym and the concept have a longer history. The acronym was devised in 1972 by Bob Costello, then the US Deputy Director of Defense, at an early stage of the US initiative to decrease costs and shorten development cycles for military and weapons systems. As the speed with which new generations of electronics hardware was being developed continued to rise, manufacturers of military hardware also faced the problem that by the time development of a weapon system had been completed, many of its sub-systems or components would be at best obsolete, and probably no longer in production. By the time that the US Navy fielded the Aegis weapon system in 1978, over half of the hardware used was no longer available. A 2001 report by the US Army Aviation and Missile Command noted that, as a result of rising costs and shrinking budgets, the Department of Defense was buying fewer and fewer systems, and that defence procurement now accounted for only about 0.3 per cent of the microelectronics market. "Many electronics manufacturers have decided it is no longer worth the cost to chase such a small market, and they are unwilling to adapt their product lines to meet rigorous military specifications", the report warned. By the 1980s, commercial off-the-shelf hardware was finding a military role. Two examples will serve to illustrate this trend. By the time of Perry's 1994 initiative, a move was already underway in Europe to use commercial hardware in place of expensive military-specification components in instances where the anticipated operating environment would allow this. In many cases, navies were the first to exploit Cots, having realised that the environment inside a ship's control room is not dissimilar to those in laboratories or industrial plants. Fo...See the full content of this document
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