Missile Procurement

AMRAAM Not Ready for Full-Rate Production Gao ID: NSIAD-89-201 September 7, 1989

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the status of the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) before the Secretary of Defense's decision to begin full production, focusing on whether: (1) operationally realistic tests demonstrated the missile's required performance; (2) the missile's design was complete and stable; and (3) the contractors demonstrated the ability to produce quality missiles at the required production rates.

GAO found that: (1) although the completed tests demonstrated that AMRAAM met many performance requirements, the Air Force did not show that AMRAAM could meet its probability-of-kill requirement; (2) a high number of failures early in testing showed that AMRAAM could not meet reliability requirements and that it needed additional design changes; (3) although the AMRAAM design continued to evolve during the first year of production, the Air Force did not complete all the required corrective actions; (4) the delivered missiles did not meet all performance requirements, since the design corrections required additional time; and (5) the Air Force delayed its full-rate production readiness reviews until December 1989.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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