Mission Engineering
Mission Engineering (ME) is the deliberate planning, analyzing, organizing, and integrating of current and emerging operational and system capabilities to achieve desired warfighting mission effects.
ME is an analytical and data-driven approach to decompose and analyze the constituent parts of a mission in order to identify measurable trade-offs and draw conclusions.
Mission Engineering studies and analyses seek answers to key technical challenges identified by the OSD, Joint Staff, Services, and Combatant Commands.
OUSD(R&E) develops, implements, and shares the ME process and methodology, best practices, and ME products with a user community across the Department of Defense. In addition, R&E has adopted mission engineering as a key element in the organization and executed ME analyses or studies to evaluate missions and assess efficacy of advanced technology from the modernization areas. These studies are coordinated across numerous stakeholders.
ME Principles
Follow a mission-focused, threat-informed approach to identify capabilities and technologies to achieve mission objectives and close capability gaps.
Evaluate systems and systems of systems (SoS) in an operational mission context to inform stakeholders about building the right things, not just building things right.
Use validated mission definitions and trustworthy and curated data sets as the basis for analyses to answer a set of operational or tactical questions.
Ensure to balance the time frame of interest, analytical rigor to be used, and the complexity of the problem to be addressed.
Begin with the end in mind, a carefully articulated problem statement, the characterization of the mission and identification of metrics, and working through the collection of data and models needed to analyze the mission and document/convey the outputs (results).