The Use of Commercial Standards in DoD Applications

Abstract

The current DoD policy for Acquisition Reform uses COTS products whenever possible to avoid development costs of new systems acquisition. The Next Generation Instrumentation Bus (NexGenBus) project is currently evaluating commercial standards for a high-speed instrumentation bus standard. Since commercial vendors, institutes, and groups design these standards for commercial applications, DoD cannot blindly adopt one of these standards for use in military environments. The standard should be tested, evaluated, and possibly changed based on the application. Using COTS products to evaluate a commercial standard can be tricky - if a unit fails, which is at fault? From a standards perspective, deviations are never desired, though they are required to make it usable for a specific application (e.g., test instrumentation) and creating a nonconforming variation to the standard.