A
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
defense standard, often called a
military standard, "
MIL-STD", "
MIL-SPEC", or (informally) "
MilSpecs", is used to help achieve standardization objectives by the U.S. Department of Defense.
StandardizationStandardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
is beneficial in achieving
interoperabilityInteroperability is a property referring to the ability of diverse systems and organizations to work together . The term is often used in a technical systems engineering sense, or alternatively in a broad sense, taking into account social, political, and organizational factors that impact system to...
, ensuring products meet certain requirements, commonality,
reliabilityReliability engineering is an engineering field, that deals with the study, evaluation, and life-cycle management of reliability: the ability of a system or component to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time. It is often measured as a probability of...
,
total cost of ownershipTotal cost of ownership is a financial estimate whose purpose is to help consumers and enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a product or system...
, compatibility with
logisticsMilitary logistics is the discipline of planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of military forces. In its most comprehensive sense, it is those aspects or military operations that deal with:...
systems, and similar defense-related objectives
http://www.dsp.dla.mil/APP_UIL/policy.aspx?action=content&accounttype=displaypolicy&contentid=33.
Defense standards are also used by other non-defense government organizations, technical organizations, and industry. This article discusses definitions, history, and usage of defense standards. Related documents, such as
defense handbooks and
defense specifications are also addressed.
Definition of document types
Although the official definitions differentiate between several types of documents, all of these documents go by the general rubric of "military standard", including non defense specifications, handbooks, and standards. Strictly speaking, these documents serve different purposes. According to the
Government Accountability OfficeThe Government Accountability Office is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the United States Congress. It is located in the legislative branch of the United States government.-History:...
(GAO), military specifications "describe the physical and/or operational characteristics of a product", while military standards "detail the processes and materials to be used to make the product." Military handbooks, on the other hand, are primarily sources of compiled information and/or guidance. The GAO acknowledges, however, that the terms are often used interchangeably.
Official definitions are provided by
DOD 4120.24-M Defense Standardization Program (DSP) Policies and Procedures, March 2000, OUSD (Acquisition, Technology and Logistics):
| Acronym | |
Formats
The DOD has standards about the format of standards:
Origins and evolution
Defense standards evolved from the need to ensure proper performance, maintainability and reparability (ease of MROMaintenance, repair, and operations or maintenance, repair, and overhaul involves fixing any sort of mechanical or electrical device should it become out of order or broken...
), and logistical usefulness of military equipment. The latter two goals (MRO and logistics) favor certain general concepts, such as interchangeabilityInterchangeable parts are parts that are, for practical purposes, identical. They are made to specifications that ensure that they are so nearly identical that they will fit into any device of the same type. One such part can freely replace another, without any custom fitting...
, standardizationStandardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
(of equipment and processes, in general), cataloguing, communications, and training (to teach people what is standardized, what is at their discretion, and what the details of the standards are). In the late 18th century and throughout the 19th, the AmericanThe United States Armed Forces are the military forces of the United States. They consist of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard.The United States has a strong tradition of civilian control of the military...
and French militaries were early adopters and longtime developmental sponsors and advocates of interchangeability and standardization. By World War II, virtually all national militariesA military is an organization authorized by its greater society to use lethal force, usually including use of weapons, in defending its country by combating actual or perceived threats. The military may have additional functions of use to its greater society, such as advancing a political agenda e.g...
and trans-national alliances of the same (Allied Forces, Axis powersThe Axis powers , also known as the Axis alliance, Axis nations, Axis countries, or just the Axis, was an alignment of great powers during the mid-20th century that fought World War II against the Allies. It began in 1936 with treaties of friendship between Germany and Italy and between Germany and...
) were busy standardizing and cataloguing. The U.S. AN- cataloguing system (Army-Navy) and the British Defence Standards (DEF-STAN) were examples.
For example, due to differences in dimensional tolerances, in World War II American screwA screw, or bolt, is a type of fastener characterized by a helical ridge, known as an external thread or just thread, wrapped around a cylinder. Some screw threads are designed to mate with a complementary thread, known as an internal thread, often in the form of a nut or an object that has the...
s, bolts, and nutsA nut is a type of hardware fastener with a threaded hole. Nuts are almost always used opposite a mating bolt to fasten a stack of parts together. The two partners are kept together by a combination of their threads' friction, a slight stretch of the bolt, and compression of the parts...
did not fit British equipment properly and were not fully interchangeable. Defense standards provide many benefits, such as minimizing the number of types of ammunition, ensuring compatibility of tools, and ensuring quality during production of military equipment. This results, for example, in ammunition and food cases that can be opened without tools; vehicle subsystems that can be quickly swapped into the place of damaged ones; and small arms and artillery that are less likely to find themselves with an excess of ammunition that does not fit their bores and a lack of ammo that does.
However, the proliferation of standards also has some drawbacks. The main one is that they impose what is functionally equivalent to a regulatoryRegulation is administrative legislation that constitutes or constrains rights and allocates responsibilities. It can be distinguished from primary legislation on the one hand and judge-made law on the other...
burden upon the defense supply chain, both within the military and across its civilian suppliers. Almost nothing can be done according to sound case-by-case judgment, and almost everything requires constant, extensive study of the rules and verification that they are being followed "to a T". WorkflowA workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work...
s frequently pause (causing snowballing schedule delays) for reasons that are sometimes essentially trivial, and unit costThe unit cost of a product is the cost per standard unit supplied, which may be a single sample or a container of a given number. When purchasing more than a single unit, the total cost will increase with the number of units, but it is common for the unit cost to decrease as quantity is increased...
s rise.
In the U.S. during the 1980s and early 1990s, it was argued that the large number of standards, nearly 30,000 by 1990, imposed unnecessary restrictions, increased cost to contractors (and hence the DOD, since the costs in the end pass along to the customer), and impeded the incorporation of the latest technology. Responding to increasing criticism, Secretary of Defense William PerryWilliam James Perry is an American businessman and engineer who was the United States Secretary of Defense from February 3, 1994, to January 23, 1997, under President Bill Clinton...
issued a memorandum in 1994 that prohibited the use of most defense standards without a waiver. This has become known as the "Perry memo". Many defense standards were canceled. In their place, the DOD encouraged the use of industry standards, such as ISO 9000The ISO 9000 family of standards relates to quality management systems and is designed to help organizations ensure they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders . The standards are published by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, and available through National...
series for quality assurance (see COTSIn the United States, Commercially available Off-The-Shelf is a Federal Acquisition Regulation term defining a nondevelopmental item of supply that is both commercial and sold in substantial quantities in the commercial marketplace, and that can be procured or utilized under government contract...
), SAESAE International is an organization for engineering professionals in the aerospace, automotive, and commercial vehicle industries. The Society is a standards development organization for the engineering of powered vehicles of all kinds, including cars, trucks, boats, aircraft, and others.SAE...
standards such as the AS and AMS series (e.g., AS9100, AMS 2404), and others. Weapon systems were required to use "performance specifications" that described the desired features and performance of the weapon, as opposed to how those goals would be reached (that is, exactly which technology and which materials would be used). In 2005 the DOD issued a new memorandum which eliminated the requirement to obtain a waiver in order to use defense standards. The 2005 memo did not reinstate any canceled defense standards.
According to a 2003 issue of Gateway, published by the Human Systems Information Analysis Center http://iac.dtic.mil/hsiac/GW-docs/gw_xiv_2.pdf, the number of defense standards and specifications have been reduced from 45,500 to 28,300. However, other sources noted that the number of standards just before the Perry memorandum was issued was less than 30,000, and that thousands have been canceled since then. This may be due to differences in what is counted as a "military standard".
Another potential drawback of carrying standardization to an extreme is a threat analogous to monocultureMonoculture is the agricultural practice of producing or growing one single crop over a wide area. It is also known as a way of farming practice of growing large stands of a single species. It is widely used in modern industrial agriculture and its implementation has allowed for large harvests from...
(where lack of biodiversity creates higher risk of pandemic disease) or a ship without bulkheadA bulkhead is an upright wall within the hull of a ship or within the fuselage of an airplane. Other kinds of partition elements within a ship are decks and deckheads.-Etymology:...
compartmentalization (where even a small hull leak threatens to fill the whole vessel). If an enemy discovers a drawback in a standardized system, the system's uniformity leaves it vulnerable to complete incapacitation via what might otherwise have been a limited compromise. Also, materielMateriel is a term used in English to refer to the equipment and supplies in military and commercial supply chain management....
overrun by advancing enemy lines is potentially easier for the enemy to make use of if it is extensively standardized; but this threat is somewhat academic, as even poorly standardized materiel presents a likelihood of supplying an enemy if overrun.
Non-exhaustive list of documents
- Cataloging Handbook H2, definitions for NATO Stock Number Federal Supply Groups and Federal Supply Classes
A NATO Stock Number, or National Stock Number as it is known in the US, is a 13-digit numeric code, identifying all the 'standardized material items of supply' as they have been recognized by all NATO countries including United States Department of Defense...
- Cataloging Handbook H4, a handbook containing vendor CAGE
The Commercial And Government Entity Code, or CAGE Code, is a unique identifier assigned to suppliers to various government or defense agencies, as well as to government agencies themselves and also various organizations...
code details
- Cataloging Handbook H6, Item Name Directory for the NATO Codification System
The NATO Codification System is a standard approach to identify, classify and number items of supply. This is applicable to items that are repetitively used and stocked...
- Cataloging Handbook H8, another handbook containing vendor CAGE
The Commercial And Government Entity Code, or CAGE Code, is a unique identifier assigned to suppliers to various government or defense agencies, as well as to government agencies themselves and also various organizations...
code details
- MIL-E-7016F
The military standard referred to as MIL-E-7016F, Electric Load and Power Source Capacity, Aircraft, Analysis of" addresses the methods and analysis of electric loads and source capacity on military aircraft. The use of the document is approved for use by all departments and agencies of the United...
, pertains to the analysis of AC and DC loads on an aircraft.
- MIL-STD-105
MIL-STD-105 was a United States defense standard that provided procedures and tables for sampling by attributes based on Walter A. Shewhart, Harry Romig, and Harold Dodge sampling inspection theories and mathematical formulas...
, Sampling Procedures and Tables for Inspection by Attributes (withdrawn)
- MIL-STD-188
MIL-STD-188 is a series of U.S. military standards relating to telecommunications.-Purpose:Faced with “past technical deficiencies in telecommunications systems and equipment and software…that were traced to basic inadequacies in the application of telecommunication standards and to the lack of a...
, a series related to telecommunications
- MIL-STD-196, a specification of the Joint Electronics Type Designation System
The Joint Electronics Type Designation System , which was previously known as the Joint Army-Navy Nomenclature System and the Joint Communications-Electronics Nomenclature System, is a method developed by the U.S. War Department during World War II for assigning an unclassified designator to...
(JETDS)
- MIL-STD-202, test methods for electronic and electrical parts.
- MIL-STD 461, "Requirements for the control of electromagnetic interference characteristics of subsystems and equipment"
- MIL-STD-498
MIL-STD-498 was a United States military standard whose purpose was to "establish uniform requirements for software development and documentation." It was released Nov. 8, 1994, and replaced DOD-STD-2167A, DOD-STD-7935A, and DOD-STD-1703...
, on software development and documentation
- MIL-STD-499, on Engineering Management (System Engineering)
- MIL-STD-810, test methods for determining the environmental effects on equipment
- MIL-HDBK-881, writing Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
- MIL-STD-882, standard practice for system safety
- MIL-STD-883
The MIL-STD-883 standard establishes uniform methods, controls, and procedures for testing microelectronic devices suitable for use within Military and Aerospace electronic systems including basic environmental tests to determine resistance to deleterious effects of natural elements and conditions...
, test method standard for microcircuits http://www.dscc.dla.mil/programs/milspec/ListDocs.asp?BasicDoc=MIL-STD-883
- MIL-STD-1234
MIL-STD-1234 is a United States DoD standard that describes the general methods of sampling, inspection, and testing pyrotechnics for conformance with the material requirements of various pyrotechnic specifications....
, sampling, inspection, and testing of pyrotechnics
- MIL-STD-1246C, particle and molecular contamination levels for space hardware (has been replaced with IEST-STD-CC1246D
IEST-STD-CC1246D, published in 2002,is the latest revision of MIL-STD-1246D. This all came about in 1997, the Army Missile Command commissioned IEST to revise and adopt MIL-STD-1246 as an industry standard as its usefulness had expanded far beyond military applications, and U.S...
).
- MIL-STD-1388-1A, Logistics support analysis (LSA) (canceled and s/s by MIL-HDBK-502, Acquisition Logistics)
- MIL-STD-1388-2B, DOD requirements for a logistic support analysis record (canceled and s/s by MIL-PRF-49506, Logistics Management Information)
- MIL-STD-1394
MIL-STD-1394 and MIL-STD-1394B are Defense Standards, assigned as "PROVISIONS FOR EVALUATING QUALITY OF CAP CROWNS" by the United States Department of Defense, which control and maintain the specification. Like most mil-specs, they are freely obtainable at...
, this is concerned with the construction quality of hats and is often confused with IEEE 1394The IEEE 1394 interface is a serial bus interface standard for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer, frequently used by personal computers, as well as in digital audio, digital video, automotive, and aeronautics applications. The interface is also known by the brand...
.
- MIL-STD-1397
MIL-STD-1397 standard was issued by the United States Department of Defense to define "the requirements for the physical, functional and electrical characteristics of a standard I/O data interface for digital data." The MIL-STD-1397 classification types A, B and D apply specifically to the Naval...
, Input/Output Interfaces, Standard Digital Data, Navy Systems
- MIL-STD-1472F, Human Engineering
- MIL-STD-1474, a sound measurement for small arms standard
- MIL-STD-1553
MIL-STD-1553 is a military standard published by the United States Department of Defense that defines the mechanical, electrical, and functional characteristics of a serial data bus. It was originally designed for use with military avionics, but has also become commonly used in spacecraft on-board...
, a digital communications bus
- MIL-STD-1589, JOVIAL
JOVIAL is a high-order computer programming language similar to ALGOL, but specialized for the development of embedded systems .JOVIAL is an acronym for "Jules Own Version of the International...
programming languageA programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
- MIL-STD-1750A, an instruction set architecture (ISA) for airborne computers
- MIL-STD-1760
MIL-STD-1760 Aircraft/Store Electrical Interconnection System defines a standardized electrical interface between a military aircraft and its carriage stores. Carriage stores range from weapons, such as GBU-31 JDAM, to pods, such as AN/AAQ-14 LANTIRN, to external fuel tanks...
, smart-weapons interface derived from MIL-STD-1553
- MIL-STD-1815, Ada programming language
Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages...
- MIL-STD-1913, Picatinny rail
The Picatinny rail or MIL-STD-1913 rail or STANAG 2324 rail or a "Tactical Rail" is a bracket used on some firearms in order to provide a standardized mounting platform. A similar system is the Weaver rail mount.-Description:...
, a mounting bracket on firearms
- MIL-STD-2045-47001, Connectionless Data Transfer Application Layer
- MIL-STD-2196, pertains to optical fiber communications
- MIL-STD-2361
This military standard established the Standard Generalized Markup Language and the ExtensibleMarkup Language requirements for use in Army digital publications. Within this military standard , Army...
, pertains to digital development, acquisition, and delivery of Army administrative, training and doctrine, and technical equipment publications in SGML.
- MIL-STD-2525, Common Warfighting Symbology (APP-6A)
- MIL-STD-3011, Joint Range Extension Application Protocol
The Joint Range Extension Applications Protocol extends the range of Tactical Digital Information Link by permitting tactical data messages to be transmitted over long-distance networks, e.g...
(JREAP)
- MIL-STD-6011, Tactical Data Link (TDL) 11/11B Message Standard (Link-11)
- MIL-STD-6013, Army Tactical Data Link-1 (ATDL-1)
- MIL-STD-6016, Tactical Data Link (TDL) 16 Message Standard (Link-16)
Link 16 is a military tactical data exchange network created and used by the United States and adopted by some of its Allies and by NATO. Its specification is part of the family of Tactical Data Links....
- MIL-STD-6017, Variable Message Format
Variable Message Format, abbreviated "VMF", is a protocol used in communicating tactical military information.A message formatted using VMF can be sent via many communication methods. Because it does not define this method, it is not a Tactical Digital Information Link.VMF is documented in...
(VMF)
- MIL-STD-6040, United States Message Text Format (USMTF)
United States Message Text Format is a Military Standard collection of information exchanges, currently defined in W3C XML Schema, which seeks to improve the interoperability of Joint military systems. The US national version is coordinated with NATO for coalition interoperability. The standard...
- MIL-PRF-38534
The MIL-PRF-38534 specification establishes the general performance requirements for hybrid microcircuits , Multi-Chip Modules and, similar devices and the verification and validation requirements for ensuring that these devices meet the applicable performance requirements. Verification is...
, General Specification For Hybrid Microcircuits.
- MIL-PRF-38535
The MIL-PRF-38535 specification, a military performance standards , establishes the general performance requirements for integrated circuits or microcircuits and the quality and reliability assurance requirements, which are to be met for their acquisition...
, General Specification For Integrated Circuits (Microcircuits) Manufacturing.
See also
- ASTM International
ASTM International, known until 2001 as the American Society for Testing and Materials , is an international standards organization that develops and publishes voluntary consensus technical standards for a wide range of materials, products, systems, and services...
- National Aerospace Standard (NAS)
- National Aerospace Standard, Metric (NASM)
- Standardization
Standardization is the process of developing and implementing technical standards.The goals of standardization can be to help with independence of single suppliers , compatibility, interoperability, safety, repeatability, or quality....
- Specification
- Military technology and equipment
- Standards organizations
- International standard
International standards are standards developed by international standards organizations. International standards are available for consideration and use, worldwide...
- American National Standards Institute
The American National Standards Institute is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organization also coordinates U.S. standards with international...
- Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technology -IEST
- M13486
M13486 is a frequently used MIL-SPEC wire and a heavy duty vehicle and aircraft cable.The MIL-DTL-13486 military specification was last revised in May 2006 and was originally created by the Department of Defense. The specification typically covers special purpose electrical cables that are...
- U.S. Military connector specifications
- STANAG
STANAG is the NATO abbreviation for Standardization Agreement, which sets up processes, procedures, terms, and conditions for common military or technical procedures or equipment between the member countries of the alliance. Each NATO state ratifies a STANAG and implements it within their own...
External links
The source of this article is
wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the
GFDL.
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