Summaries Of Conclusions And Recommendations On Department Of Defense Operations

GAO provided a summary of its findings, conclusions, and recommendations on Department of Defense (DOD) operations.

GAO noted that: (1) no single organization in DOD has responsibility and authority for total planning and operating of the AUTODIN system; (2) problems associated with this fragmented managerial responsibility are exemplified in two Defense communications programs--a 6-year-old program consolidating existing AUTODIN terminals and a program automating AUTODIN centers; (3) DOD terminals had not been consolidated as much as possible; (4) military departments did not effectively justify and coordinate their automation plans and, consequently, unneeded automation equipment units were being developed; (5) the San Antonio Air Logistics Center (formerly Air Materiel Area) could improve its use of direct resources for repairing, overhauling, and modifying end-items; (6) the Center's work measurement system, which was intended to improve labor productivity and provide decisionmaking data, fell short of its objectives because of inflated or inappropriate labor standards and incomplete productivity analyses; (7) in reviewing depot operations, GAO found that the Army's vehicle overhaul criteria were not correctly applied, depots were doing work that should have been done by subordinate repair activities, frequent workload fluctuations adversely affected work scheduling and personnel requirements, and costs were recorded inaccurately or accounted for improperly; (8) GAO concluded that managing a naval shipyard efficiently and economically is difficult because of some limiting factors but that the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard could raise its productivity by improving: (a) machine-use data, (b) shipyard work measurement system; and (c) the quality assurance system; (9) the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps do not have long-range requirements planning in their enlisted force management systems; (10) DOD has not established firm criteria for applying, adjusting, and removing reenlistment bonuses; (11) the Air Force uses a mechanized system to manage such nonexpendable equipment items as generators, vehicles, test equipment, and tools; (12) the Air Force has about 86,000 line items of nonexpendable equipment with a worldwide inventory of about $8.3 billion; and (13) GAO concluded that unreliable data from the Air Force's system was being used to compute requirements which caused gross equipment needs to be significantly misstated and assets available to meet these needs to be incorrectly stated.