Army Acquisition

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Army's revised Air Defense Antitank System (ADATS) program, focusing on whether: (1) it improved ADATS reliability; (2) the tests and criteria established for the extension phase would provide sufficient performance information for production approval; and (3) the Army's cost and operational effectiveness assessment was still valid.

GAO found that: (1) the Army delayed planned tests due to restructuring and contractor failure to achieve an internally imposed level of statistical confidence to ensure that the system would meet its first interim criteria; (2) delays in operational testing made it unlikely that congressional authorization and appropriations committees would have timely test information that demonstrated that ADATS met any of its interim reliability criteria; (3) such weapon subsystem reliability criteria as the required average time between equipment failures established for the 2-year extension fell short of ADATS fielding contract requirements; (4) lowered reliability would result in increased operation and support costs; (5) live-fire and operational test results raised concerns regarding the decreased probability of ADATS survival due to its position in the forward battle area; (6) unit cost increases resulted from reduced fire unit quantities, reduced production rates, and production delays; and (7) increased vulnerability resulted from live-fire testing, and reliability and maintainability results from operational tests suggested that irreplaceable losses would occur more frequently than assumed.

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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