This title summarizes discussions with over 450 Army officers (lieutenants through colonels) about leader development in Army units. These discussions revealed that the type and extent of leader development activities vary greatly across units, but that they are generally informal and most heavily influenced by the unit commander. The authors conclude with suggestions on how the Army school system can improve leader development.

The authors investigate whether the tenure of program managers contributes to Nunn-McCurdy breaches. They also examine the existing decentralized systems used to track cost growth to determine whether additional guidance and control are needed to make acquisition category II programs performance more transparent. Finally, they investigate whether key assumptions, so-called framing assumptions, could be useful risk management tools.

This analysis uses data from Selected Acquisition Reports to determine the causes of cost growth in 35 mature major defense acquisition programs. Four major sources of growth are identified: errors in estimation and scheduling, decisions by the government, financial matters, and miscellaneous. The analysis shows that more than two-thirds of cost growth (measured as simple averages) is caused by decisions, most of which involve quantity changes, requirements growth, and schedule changes.Cost growth in major weapon-systems programs results from errors in estimation and scheduling, government decisions, financial matters, and miscellaneous sources, with decisions involving changes in requirements, quantities, and production schedules the dominant cause.

What is the potential for a divergence in views among civilian and military elites (sometimes referred to as the civil-military gap) to undermine military effectiveness? Although a variety of differences were found among the views of military and civilian survey respondents, these differences mostly disappeared when the authors focused on the attitudes that are pertinent to civilian control of the military and military effectiveness.