Chemical Weapons

Stockpile Destruction Delayed at the Army's Prototype Disposal Facility Gao ID: NSIAD-90-222 July 30, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) Chemical Stockpile Program.

GAO found that: (1) the Army's effort to expand and test the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System (JACADS) delayed its operations; (2) full-scale operations at JACADS slipped another 9.5 months because of technical and contractor staffing problems during the program's operations and maintenance phase; (3) continuing technical problems could result in further slippage in the JACADS schedule; (4) the Army's estimated total costs for JACADS have increased $190 million and will likely continue to grow; (5) the Army has developed a program for implementing design changes to the follow-on stateside chemical disposal facilities based on the technical problems encountered at JACADS; (6) the Army has taken actions to improve the contractor's performance and its own oversight of the operations and maintenance contract; (7) Army officials said that the operations and maintenance contract did not include adequate provisions for the Army to ensure that contractor overtime was necessary; (8) the Army plans to incorporate lessons learned from operations verification testing at JACADS into the design of future U.S. disposal plants; (9) JACADS schedule delays caused construction start-up delays at three other planned facilities; and (10) because of delays in JACADS operational verification testing schedules, additional munition storage time is needed and will increase storage costs to an estimated $33 million.

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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