Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System

The Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS), is the formal United States Department of Defense (DoD) procedure which defines acquisition requirements and evaluation criteria for future defense programs. JCIDS was created to replace the previous service-specific requirements generation system, which created redundancies in capabilities and failed to meet the combined needs of all US military services. In order to correct these problems, JCIDS is intended to guide the development of requirements for future acquisition systems to reflect the needs of all four services (Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force) by focusing the requirements generation process on needed capabilities as requested or defined by one of the US combatant commanders. In the JCIDS process, regional and functional combatant commanders give feedback early in the development process to ensure that their requirements are met.

JCIDS was developed under the direction of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to address shortfalls in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) requirements generation system identified by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These shortfalls were identified as: not considering new programs in the context of other programs, not sufficiently considering combined service requirements and effectively prioritizing joint service requirements, and not accomplishing sufficient analysis. The drive to create JCIDS was born out of a memo in March 2002 from the Secretary of Defense to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff requesting a study on alternative ways to evaluate requirements. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) approved the most recent JCIDS Instruction on 23 January 2015 and its accompanying manual was released on 12 February 2015. CJCS Instruction (CJCSI) 3170.01I provides a top-level description of the process and outlines the organizational responsibilities. The JCIDS Manual defines performance attributes, key performance parameters, validation and approval processes, and associated document content.

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