"fudog50" wrote in message
...
Tarver,
Nice of you to speak for the entire Navy,

Guys on boats like the F-18Es reliability.

but you must be only
speaking of the Contractors, PMA guys and bean counters that can't
see the forest through the trees. COTS is good if you have the sparing
and support, (rare).

LOL

OK

COTS allows engineers to buy parts, as opposed to designing to now expired
component Mil-specs. The first real benifit of COTS was seen in Desert
Storm, where the USAF had greatly improved missiles. Allowing engineers to
buy parts to test solid fuels created technology during the 1980s and the in
service reliabity data tied to Mil-Hbk 217F. Once an engineer adopts the
way of thinking that some parts/lines* count is directly tied to reliabilty,
(statistical) then they will "design for reliability by using less
lines/parts.

* software code.