JCIDS; the Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution process; and the Defense Acquisition System broadly make up DOD’s overall defense acquisition management framework. JCIDS was implemented in 2003 to guide future defense programs from a joint capabilities perspective. JCIDS is one of the first steps in DOD’s acquisition processes; JCIDS participants work to identify and determine whether to validate the need for capabilities proposed by the services, the defense agencies, and the combatant commands. Once a requirement is validated, the services rely on the DOD’s Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution process, through which DOD allocates financial resources across the department—including the services—to identify funding for validated capability solutions. DOD then manages the development and procurement of proposed capabilities through the Defense Acquisition System. DOD implemented the JCIDS process in 2003 in an effort to assist the JROC by changing DOD’s requirements validation process from a service-specific perspective to a joint capabilities perspective. The JROC, which is chaired by the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, consists of a general or admiral from each of the military services and may include combatant commanders or deputy commanders when directed by the JROC Chairman. The JROC is charged with assisting the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a number of tasks, including (1) identifying, assessing, and approving joint military requirements to meet the national military strategy; (2) establishing and assigning priority levels for joint military requirements; and (3) reviewing the estimated level of resources required to fulfill each joint military requirement and ensuring that the resource level is consistent with the requirement’s priority, among others. The JROC also assists acquisition officials in identifying alternatives to any acquisition programs that meet joint military requirements for the purposes of certain statutory provisions, addressing matters such as cost growth. In 2009, the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act expanded the role of the JROC by directing it to assist the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in ensuring that trade-offs among cost, schedule, and performance objectives are considered for joint military requirements and establishing an objective for the overall period of time within which an initial operational capability should be delivered to meet each joint military requirement. The JROC reviews requirements for programs designated as JROC- interest based on their expected cost and complexity and, under guidance in effect through December 2011, also reviewed programs at the request of certain senior DOD officials. Within JCIDS, the JROC is supported in its duty to review and validate joint capability needs by the Joint Capabilities Board and six Functional Capabilities Boards. The Joint Capabilities Board is chaired by the Director of the Joint Staff’s Directorate for Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment, and each Functional Capabilities Board is chaired by a general/flag officer or civilian equivalent. The Joint Capabilities Board reviews capability documents before they are passed on to the JROC for its review and also serves as the validation authority for certain programs that do not reach JROC- interest thresholds, although the JROC may review any JCIDS document or other issues requiring joint resolution. Functional Capabilities Boards are responsible for reviewing proposed requirements specific to joint capability areas, such as protection, logistics, or battlespace awareness. In JCIDS, the JROC and its supporting organizations review requirements documents related to capability gaps and the major defense acquisition programs intended to fill those gaps prior to key acquisition milestones. These requirements documents—initial capabilities documents, capability development documents, and capability production documents for materiel solutions and change recommendations for nonmateriel solutions—are submitted into the JCIDS process by capability sponsors.The initial capabilities document identifies a specific capability gap, or set of gaps, and if a materiel solution is required, helps inform the initial stages of the acquisition process, which include an analysis of the alternative solutions to fulfilling the capability need and the selection of a preferred system concept. When the technology development phase of the acquisition process is complete, a program sponsor completes a capability development document that includes more detail on the desired capabilities of the proposed system and defines the system’s key performance parameters or attributes against which the delivered increment of capability will be measured. Finally, the sponsor prepares a capability production document to describe the actual performance of the system that will deliver the required capability. Figure 1 depicts how JCIDS reviews align with the acquisition process. The House Armed Services Committee and a panel established by the committee have discussed long-standing challenges with the JCIDS process and the JROC’s fulfillment of its statutory responsibilities. The House Armed Services Committee, in a report accompanying a bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, described a legislative provision that would allow for joint decision making as opposed to service-centric budget considerations by incorporating clear priorities and budget guidance into the JROC process. In 2009, the House Armed Services Committee established a panel on defense acquisition reform because of a sense that the acquisition system was not responsive enough for today’s needs, not rigorous enough in protecting taxpayers, and not disciplined enough in the acquisition of weapon systems for tomorrow’s wars. The panel received testimony that the Joint Staff lacked some of the analytical expertise necessary to ensure that the JCIDS process rigorously vets proposed requirements. Additionally, since 2008 we have reported on these challenges. We reported in 2008 that the JCIDS process was not effective in prioritizing capability gaps, and we noted that capability needs continued to be proposed and defined by the services with little involvement from the joint community. We recommended that the Secretary of Defense direct the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop an analytic approach within JCIDS to better prioritize and balance the capability needs of the military services, combatant commands, and other defense components. DOD partially agreed with our recommendation but did not fully implement it, and prioritization remains service driven. More recently, in June 2011 we reported that the JROC did not always consider trade-offs among cost, schedule, and performance objectives; prioritize requirements; consider redundancies across proposed programs; or prioritize and analyze capability gaps in a consistent manner. We recommended that the JROC require higher-quality resource estimates from requirements sponsors to ensure that best practices are being followed, provide a sound basis to ensure that trade-offs are considered, prioritize requirements across proposed programs, and address potential redundancies during requirements reviews, among other steps. DOD partially agreed with our recommendations and commented that improvements to the quality of resource estimates would be addressed in upcoming changes to the JCIDS process. In May 2011, we also reported that combatant command officials raised concerns that JCIDS focuses more on long-term service-centric capability gaps than on combatant commands’ more immediate and largely joint gaps. JCIDS was designed as a deliberate process to meet longer-term joint needs. To address urgent needs, DOD established a separate process—the joint urgent operational needs process—in 2005. The joint urgent operational needs process was intended to respond to needs associated with combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the War on Terror. The revised JCIDS guidance canceled separate guidance for joint urgent operational needs and incorporates and describes the joint urgent operational needs process. Urgent operational needs, as defined by the new JCIDS guidance, are capability requirements needed for ongoing or anticipated contingency operations that if left unfulfilled could potentially result in loss of life or critical mission failure. For this report, we focus on requirements that have not been identified as urgent and instead follow the deliberative JCIDS process. The Joint Staff is undertaking efforts to improve the ability to prioritize capability needs from a joint perspective through JCIDS and to align those needs with available budget resources. However, implementation processes for JCIDS’s new approach to managing requirements and considering affordability are still evolving and have not been fully developed and clearly documented. Determining priorities among joint requirements has been a responsibility of the JROC since Congress amended section 181 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code in 2008 to require the JROC to assist in establishing and assigning priority levels for joint military requirements and to help ensure that resource levels associated with those requirements are consistent with the level of priority. DOD officials acknowledge that JCIDS has been ineffective in helping the JROC carry out these responsibilities. We have previously reported that JCIDS’s ability to align resources to balance competing needs could be improved if it had an analytic approach that provided a means to review and validate proposals to ensure that the most important capability needs of the department are being addressed. We further said that such an approach should establish criteria and measures for identifying capability gaps and determining the relative importance of capability needs. Finally, the approach should result in measurable progress in allocating resources in order to eliminate redundancies, gain efficiencies, and achieve a balanced mix of executable programs. DOD officials told us that downward pressure on the defense budget has led the Joint Staff to change how the JCIDS process is used to strengthen its ability to support JROC members in making trade-off decisions among requirements and balancing risks across the force within expected resources. In fall 2011, according to officials, the incoming Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the Chairman of the JROC, began to make changes in the JCIDS processes to focus on what capabilities currently exist and weigh the benefits of investing in new capabilities with their estimated costs early in the review process. The Joint Staff issued draft guidance in October 2011 and began implementation based on the draft guidance. The Joint Staff issued the final guidance in January 2012. Descriptions of these changes and their implementation follow: New capabilities will be considered as part of a “capability portfolio approach.” Under the portfolio approach, officials stated that JROC members are to ensure that proposed investments in capabilities address joint needs or they will not be validated to proceed to the acquisition process. In addition to validating capability proposals, according to Joint Staff officials, the JROC has begun examining how the services’ existing programs can support joint operations to reduce duplication of capabilities.