| Summary: | This thesis examines the organizational causes of the Department of Defense's (DoD) inability to acquire working defense systems. One major cause of this is identified as a lack of a sufficient number of trained and experienced acquisition personnel. An examination of the definitions of Decision Support and Expert Systems is made to determine their suitability for application to this problem. The information system framework of Gorry and Scott Morton is used to structure the acquisition problem. The DoD acquisition problem is found to be a good candidate for the application of expert systems. An expert system architecture is developed to provide acquisition personnel both technical and management support. Use of a central mainframe, connected to the Defense Data Network will provide nationwide access, with centralized control of the knowledge base. The architecture allows for the incorporation of existing conventional software under expert software control. In order to reduce development cost and time, the use of existing DoD manuals, as the knowledge base, is proposed. A prototype module, utilizing the M.1 expert shell and DoD Manual 4245.7-M and NAVSO P-6071 is developed to prove the feasibility of this approach
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