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Since the end of the cold war the United States is the single dominant naval power in the world. The emphasis of the last decade has been to reduce cost while maintaining this status.

As the Navy’s infrastructure decreases, so too does its ability to be an active participant in all aspects of ship operations and design. One way that the navy has achieved large savings is by using the Military Sealift Command to manage day to day operations of the Navy’s auxiliary and underway replenishment ships. While these ships are an active part of the Navy’s fighting force, they infrequently are put into harm’s way. The natural progression in the design of these ships is to have them fully classified under current American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) rules, as they closely resemble commercial ships. The first new design to be fully classed under ABS is the T-AKE. The Navy and ABS consider the T-AKE program a trial to determine if a partnership between the two organizations can extend into the classification of all new naval ships. A major difficulty in this venture is how to translate the knowledge base which led to the development of current military specifications into rules that ABS can use for future ships.

The specific task required by the Navy in this project is to predict the inherent availability of the new T-AKE class ship. To accomplish this task, the reliability of T-AKE equipment and machinery must be known. Under normal conditions reliability data would be obtained from past ships with similar mission, equipment and machinery. Due to the unique nature of the T-AKE acquisition, this is not possible. Because of the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) equipment and machinery, military equipment and machinery reliability data can not be used directly to predict T-AKE availability. This problem is compounded by the fact that existing COTS equipment and machinery reliability data developed in commercial applications may not be applicable to a military application. A method for deriving reliability data for commercial equipment and machinery adapted or used in military applications is required.