This thesis focuses on ways to apply requirements engineering techniques and methods during the development and evolution of DoD software systems in an effort to reduce changes to system requirements. The major goal of this thesis is to provide a feasible course of action (COA) that reduces changes to requirements caused by the turnover of DoD decision-makers. We demonstrate a distributed requirements engineering environment using computer aided software engineering tools linked together with electronic mail. We create this distributed requirements engineering environment using Netscape Communicator, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Microsoft's Access97 database, Rational Corporation's Rational Rose, Mart Wright's FormMail, and Thompson Software Products' ObjectAda. We propose a COA to reduce requirements changes caused by the turnover of decision-makers that is based on the use of specialized requirements engineering teams composed of active duty officers by the geographic and functional Commanders in Chief. These teams use the distributed requirements engineering environment described above to assist in the rapid elicitation of requirements and to increase user participation in the requirements engineering process.