The more accurately a cost index captures a shipbuilder's risk, the less the Navy should have to pay its shipbuilders. The Navy uses such indexes to correct for significant cost risks outside its shipbuilders' control. A longtime material-cost index in Navy shipbuilding is the steel-vessel index, but it is outdated and volatile. The authors urge the Navy to develop a modern-vessel index that more appropriately represents the materials used today.

This paper describes how the US Navy structures fixed-price and fixed-price, incentive-fee shipbuilding contracts and how labor- and material-cost indexes can mitigate shipbuilder risk in either type of contract. The Navy frequently uses the Steel Vessel material-cost index, a Bureau of Labor Statistics-derived cost index based on the mix of materials in a typical commercial cargo ship constructed in the 1950s. The Steel Vessel Index has excessive weighting on iron and steel, thereby providing shipbuilders with a mismatch between their actual and the Index-assumed material-cost structure. We recommend the Navy use a material-cost index with more up-to-date weightings.

Defence inflation is a recurring factor in determining defence spending. It is widely reported in official government publications and in the trade press, but remains relatively neglected by defence and peace economists. In this book, international contributors from Finland, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA distinguish between defence inflation and cost escalation, and identify the causes of both. They use specific case studies to address a wide variety of theoretical and empirical issues and key questions, including the following: Does defence inflation affect all countries? What are its effects? Why does it occur? How (if at all) can defence inflation be controlled? While most industry and trade press devote considerable ink and space to the discussion of defence inflation, cost escalation, and their consequential impact on the purchasing dollars of the armed forces, economists have been relatively silent. This book aims to rectify this oversight through a multinational survey and analysis of the topic, while also identifying the opportunities for further theoretical and empirical research in the field. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Defence and Peace Economics.

The full texts of Armed Services and othr Boards of Contract Appeals decisions on contracts appeals.