The impact of changing DOD maintenance philosophies on the automatic test equipment industry

The US Department of Defense (DOD) is streamlining maintenance activities and equipment by reducing the traditional three-level approach to two levels of support: depot and organizational. This will have varying impacts on new and current weapon systems that they support. For example, if an intermediate level of maintenance is eliminated from a weapon systems, an adequate supply of spares does not exist in the pipeline, and trained personnel are not available to isolate the problems, the performance of that weapon system may become degraded. It is suggested that, in the 1990s, the ATE industry must respond to the pressures being applied to the DOD to reduce the total life-cycle costs of maintenance support while increasing the strategic and tactical flexibility of the weapon systems. The changes in the existing maintenance concepts will create a new breed of ATE (automatic test equipment). These systems will be integrated with management information systems, integrated diagnostics, and expert systems to achieve higher levels of performance