The standards reform and its impact on environmental engineering and testing standards

The standards reform initiated by the US DOD triggered many questions, a lot of confusion and even some panic among those who faced the revolutionary change. Under these circumstances, the consequences of the reform we re examined, particularly in relation to Environmental Engineering activity. It was immediately obvious that use should be continued of the main Environmental Engineering standard (MIL-STD-810E). The reason for this is related to the fact that MIL-STD-810E encourages engineering reasoning, as opposed to the ''cook book'' attitude, ''sacred books'' and inflexible thinking. In the authors' opinion, the tailoring philosophy is well adapted to the performance specification philosophy promoted by the reform. The old concept of applying the standard as a guideline for engineering thinking and methodology has been reiterated, both in the application to commercial and military products. A second issue brought up in the paper is the impact of the reform on testing activity of environmental robustness. It appeared that some open questions about the capability of commercial equipment to function under military environments could be answered through evaluation under laboratory simulated conditions. Several of the factors imposed by these testing requirements are discussed in the paper. A comparison is also presented between a military and commercial standard. Several concluding remarks complete the paper.