A. General. Materiel must perform adequately under all environmental conditions associated with its service life; withstand those conditions in transit and storage, and maintain the desired level of reliability after environmentally harsh operation, storage, and transit. In order for this to happen, the effects that environmental conditions have on materiel effectiveness and safety must be determined, considered, analyzed, and integrated into all aspects of the acquisition process as indicated in Part One, figures 4-1 and 4-2. The guidance provided here and throughout this entire standard applies to the effects of environments on systems rather than the effects of systems on environmental quality. Therefore, the thrust of this standard should not be confused with Environmental Impact programs that focus on how to preserve and protect flora and fauna from service personnel, their materiel, and their activities. Conversely, this standard pertains to the effects that environments have on materiel system effectiveness.

B. Environments of intended use.

1. Several sections of the DoD 5000-series on Defense Acquisition address environmental considerations, stressing that systems must perform well in all environments of intended use (DoDDI 5000.2). Unlike other technical areas (e.g., reliability, electromagnetic environmental effects, human factors, and environmental quality), no single section of that series is devoted to addressing natural or induced environmental factors. Therefore, this Part One of MIL-STD-810F provides basic program procedures for integrating environmental factors into the materiel acquisition process. This integration is accomplished through input to acquisition planning documents from the Mission Need Statement through the Test and Evaluation Master Plan to detailed test and evaluation plans and reports.

2. Environmental factors, working separately and in various combinations, are known to affect operation, transit, and storage of materiel. The DoD 5000-series documents point out that these factors include climate (temperature, humidity, solar radiation, rain, snow, icing phenomena, wind, blowing sand, dust and snow, ozone, freeze-thaw occurrences, fog, cloud ceiling height, and visibility); weather-related atmospheric obscurants (rain, snow, fog, cloud cover); terrain elements (slope, soil, and vegetation); induced elements (shock and vibration); and field/fleet conditions (obscurants, debris, emissions). Environmental Engineering Specialists (EES) are trained to assist acquisition personnel throughout the acquisition cycle to integrate these environmental concerns into requirements, design, test and evaluation documents, and procedures. See Appendix A of this document.

C. Balancing cost, schedule, and performance considerations. One of the basic policies governing defense acquisition covers the need to translate operational needs into stable, affordable programs. The key to this is using a concurrent systems engineering approach to help ensure reliable performance in all operational environments, when required. This entails designing a product to perform its assigned mission over time in intended operational environments and, at the same time, designing the system to survive non-operational environments (e.g., storage).