Missile Procurement

Further Production of AMRAAM Should Not Be Approved Until Questions Are Resolved Gao ID: NSIAD-90-146 May 4, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the status of the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) program at the scheduled full-rate production milestone, focusing on the: (1) missile's demonstrated operational performance; (2) contractors' readiness to produce quality missiles at the required rates; and (3) latest program cost estimates.

GAO found that: (1) despite earlier tests which demonstrated AMRAAM ability to meet many performance requirements, a few critical abilities were not proven; (2) the Air Force did not show that AMRAAM provided pilots with the capability to engage four targets simultaneously or that AMRAAM worked effectively with the Sparrow missile; (3) AMRAAM reliability remains unacceptable, despite many changes to improve reliability; (4) 10 missile failures occurred within 895 flight hours, an average of 90 hours between failures, far below the interim requirement of 200 hours set for full-rate production and the final requirement of 450 hours; (5) both contractors were at least 6 months behind their latest approved delivery schedules, and neither had shown the ability to consistently deliver missiles; and (6) the estimated AMRAAM procurement cost increased to $9.4 billion, or 24 percent above the $7.6-billion adjusted statutory cost cap for the procurement of 24,000 missiles.

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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