When the Army develops a brand new system, there are often no previous similar requirements to benchmark and minimal historical data to leverage, leaving us in a unique and difficult situation when it comes to specification requirement development. This was the case for the new Squad Designated Marksman Rifle (S-DMR), a weapon that demands a strict level of dispersion performance. As a top priority for both the individual Warfighter and US Army success, the program needed a rigorous and defensible way to develop this specification requirement in the absence of historical context. This case study details the statistical approach the team took, starting with the non-trivial task of translating the specific mission requirements of the soldier to engineering and performance requirements at the development level. We then walk through how we used JMP to model different dispersion metrics to reach an optimal requirement solution for the S-DMR system that was both rigorous and defensible.
