Systems Engineering for Usefulness and Reliability

With the increasing complexity and cost of weapon systems, it is becoming ever more important to provide a product that will be useful to the customer, that will provide reliable service, and that will have growth capabilities so that its useful life can be prolonged to meet the ever increasing enemy threat. The management of the research and development program for such large projects must provide detailed and careful planning and control in order to produce an integrated system on a minimum schedule. System approach, now the byword of the electronic industry, means many things to many people. To the authors of this paper, it is the orderly arrangement of many details that are necessary to the sound planning of a large development effort.