The purpose of the acquisition process is to provide effective, sustainable weapon systems to meet warfighter's operational needs quickly. Acquisition professionals are diligently working within the statutory and regulatory constraints, but under the old system were having difficulty achieving this goal. Why was this happening? The time to develop and field major weapon systems has been steadily growing. Over the past two decades, it has doubled to a current average of 10 years. The complexity of our systems and use of emerging technologies has driven longer development and testing cycles. Also, the Warfighter is coping with rapidly changing threats environment. This drives changes to system requirements throughout the development cycle, thus delaying delivery. Also, since a new system must provide a capability over 10 years into the future, requirements are complex, reflecting an uncertain mission and threat. Finally, our acquisition workforce has been dramatically downsized, causing the loss of many experienced professionals and decreasing our workload capacity. All the while, technology life cycles are decreasing, with a new generation of microelectronics being produced by the commercial sector every 18 months or less. This creates a disparity. With state-of-the-art technology turning over every year and a half, weapon systems in development for 10 years can be 5 or more generations behind. Not only is performance less than it could be, but many components are obsolete, and the original designs may not be producible. Once the system is fielded, it will be difficult and expensive to support. Furthermore, because it takes so long to deliver the new system, existing systems remain in use for longer periods. Maintenance of these "legacy systems" is very expensive and manpower intensive. Increasing O&M costs of older systems coupled with normal budget constraints have resulted in fewer dollars for new system development. A cyclical effect, or "death spiral", is created which will deprive the Warfighter of the systems needed to counter future threats. To reverse these trends, we must change our ways of doing business. We must use a new model, transforming a sluggish acquisition process to become agile and responsive. It must be flexible and foster innovation-a process that gets current technology into the field rapidly, then sustains and modernizes systems to reflect changing technologies, missions, and threats.