AEDC studies strategic plan

The management of the U.S. Air Force's Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) is undergoing a strategic planning process, addressing issues like how to balance the needs of the Department of Defense (DoD) against the needs of commercial customers.

AEDC Commander Col. Art Huber said that all great organizations plan strategically well.

"When I arrived here, I asked how we were strategically planning," he said. "The answer was, although we had done this activity very well in the past, we really hadn't focused on it in the last few years. So it didn't seem like a big step for me to simply reinvigorate that."

According to Aerospace Testing Alliance (ATA) General Manager Dr. David Elrod, returning to what was historically a good strategic planning process AEDC will refocus on the visions for the test center over the next 20 years. ATA is the center's primary contractor.

AEDC staff members were asked to assess the current situation and what's ahead for the center, referred to by Huber as "strategic landscaping."

Strategic planning will help determine what the center's mid-and long-term goals are and the capabilities necessary to achieve them. It involves ensuring a common understanding of AEDC's mission, identifying AEDC stakeholders, their interests and needs as well as pinpointing any gaps, constraints and barriers that might affect meeting the base's mission.

A mixed group of participants ranging from AEDC personnel, the commercial industry including Pratt & Whitney, General Electric and Lockheed Martin, as well as NASA, Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) came together to bring various perspectives to identify and formulate key issues that AEDC faces in the near- and long-term.

Huber stated that it is AEDC's responsibility to future generations and the warfighters of tomorrow to look beyond the immediate issues of the day.

"If you look around the center here, you can see the fruits of strategic planning that people have done in the past," Huber said. "The fact that AEDC has a world-class altitude jet engine test cell capability like the Aeropropulsion Systems Test Facility (ASTF) shows that someone many years ago looked to the future and said AEDC needs to have a place to test jet engines at altitude in a ground simulation facility."

According to Elrod, without commonly held strategic objectives, AEDC's decisions have been increasingly driven by tactical needs. As such, those decisions may not produce the best long term results for the center.

"Good people have tried to make good decisions based on the best information that they knew," Elrod stated. "The key going into the offsite was the need to revisit, reestablish and re-evaluate AEDC's strategic direction in light of current and future stakeholder needs."

Through briefings, open discussions and breakout sessions the offsite participants formulated issues that leadership of AEDC may need to address.

The issues were identified and ranked in order of importance. The next step is to determine in what manner and how and when each issue needs to be resolved.

Elrod said an example of one of the more difficult issues that AEDC faces is how the center utilizes commercial testing.

"Doing commercial testing has key strategic value at times of low [military] workload," he said, "but now we are facing four or five years of heavy DoD workload."

The issue, in turn, is whether to support the commercial industries at the same level or potentially turn some of that workload away in order to focus directly on government agencies.

Elrod pointed out the center's involvement in space has been somewhat sparse in the past, but the national need is great. "AEDC needs to determine if it is important to maintain some of the smaller, less utilized facilities, or focus on developing other higher levels of expertise," he said.

The issue of avoiding less than optimal use of of resources is one that both Huber and Elrod feel will be difficult.

Current processes require ATA to reduce the cost of testing by 3 to 5 percent.

"This sounds reasonable and makes sense," said Elrod, "but from a strategic viewpoint, when an aerospace program is spending a million dollars a day, whether they are testing or not. It may be much smarter for us to spend a little extra money and have resources on hand to expedite their time through AEDC rather than save a small amount of test dollars and drive a larger overall bill to the program."

The real benefit of returning to a strategic planning process for AEDC is helping the center to become more effective today and tomorrow in its support of the Department of Defense and the Air Force, and it's spending AEDC's resources on the right things at the right time, say officials.

"We made good progress towards our goal, but more remains to be done. I am pleased with the dialogue and sharing of viewpoints by our stakeholders-especially considering that this was AEDC's first strategic planning offsite in years," Elrod said, "I think we made good progress and learned some things about the process that can help us in the future."

Huber agrees, but knows there is much work ahead.

"What came out of the offsite was, a view of what our customers want and see in the future, a view of how we might work with some of our stakeholders like NASA and MDA, a view of where we are today, and where the capability owners think that the needs and requirements of the future are going to take us," said Huber, "So we did a good job of laying out the strategic landscape for near-, mid- and far-term. Now, the tough part is deciding what vectors we are going to choose to pursue."