A. General. Environmental tailoring is the process of choosing or altering materiel designs and tests so that a given materiel will be manufactured and tested to operate reliably when influenced by the various environmental factors and levels it is expected to experience throughout its service life. The tailoring process, broadly speaking, also includes preparing or reviewing engineering task and planning documents to help ensure realistic environments are given proper consideration throughout the acquisition cycle.

1. Objective of tailoring. Tailoring helps to ensure that materiel will be neither under- nor over-designed, nor under- nor over-tested with respect to specific environments it is expected to see during its service life. The tailoring process outlined in Part One, figure 4-1 shows that it is important not to take design and test criteria directly from natural environment data (descriptions of natural environmental factors or forcing functions found in STANAG 2895, MIL-HDBK-310 and AR 70-38 or elsewhere), but rather from the transformations that such forcing functions create as they interact with a platform environment (static or dynamic materiel platforms, including induced environmental changes that result from operating the materiel itself).

2. Tailoring process. Fundamental to the tailoring process is the ability to apply common scientific/engineering sense to environmental life cycle "homework," focusing on realistic materiel design and test criteria. To execute a quality tailoring process, it is necessary to give proper consideration to environments that occur throughout the materiel's life cycle. Completing Tasks 401 through 406 in Appendix A will help program managers and environmental engineering specialists to apply proper environmental considerations throughout the materiel acquisition cycle. Part One, figure 1-1 explains the tailoring process in terms of the environmental engineering tasks (Appendix A) required by this standard, thereby serving as a guide for program managers, design engineers, environmental engineering specialists, test engineers, and facility operators. Use Task 401, Environmental Engineering Management Plan (EEMP), and Task 402, Life Cycle Environmental Profile (LCEP) as the main guides for tailoring. Careful completion of each of these tasks will help ensure correct environments are identified for tests, that engineering development as well as qualification tests are phased properly into the materiel's acquisition program, and that environmental test conditions are appropriate and traceable to realistically encountered life cycle conditions.

B. Environmental testing domain.