The push is on throughout U.S. military agencies to find suppliers that can deliver higher reliability in equipment and technology. When examining what goals to set for Future Combat Systems (FCS), the US Army decided upon 10x improvement in reliability. Historically the Army has placed "too much emphasis on reliability predictions" which led to "little doubt that our legacy reliability practices have produced low reliability values." [1] The military now seeks more modern, even commercially available solutions. One of the first methodologies the US Army detailed to achieve improvement was to recommend DoD (Department of Defense) suppliers implement HALT and HASS. The Army wants suppliers to “not view reliability as just a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) but instead focus on building a product that has a sufficiently failure-free operating period.”[1]

In order to deliver sufficient failure -free operating periods, the Army is highly recommending the use of HALT (Highly Accelerated Life Test) during design cycles. HALT subjects products to stress extremes beyond that which would be encountered in normal use. By stimulating products beyond their design limits, latent design flaws can be found and fixed, and operating margins extended before a product goes into production.

Increasingly HASS (Highly Accelerated Stress Screen) is being accepted as a more economical screening process than legacy MIL and NAVMAT specifications for Army programs, such as the M2 Bradley IFV, the M3 Bradley CFV, and the AH-1G Cobra Helicopter.

This accelerated reliability testing provides fault detection prior to fielding equipment – key to extending operating margins and for realizing substantial cost savings for the military. "…the early elimination of just a few failure modes can bring about acquisition and operating and support cost savings ... Based on just one of the projects that we have worked on, the savings from identifying problems with a single circuit card can be in excess of $27M."[1]

Teams that have successfully implemented HALT HASS techniques with Qualmark for FCS and other military programs include: Lockheed Martin, BAE, Raytheon, Harris, SRC Tec, Dynetics, iRobot and KVH.

[1] www.amsaa.army.mil/ReliabilityTechnology/amsaa_atec.html