Submarine Combat System

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO identified technical risks in the Navy's SSN-21 Seawolf attack submarine's AN/BSY-2 (BSY-2) automated combat system, focusing on: (1) software and hardware development, design, testing, and integration; and (2) the use of independent verification and validation.

GAO found that: (1) the BSY-2 combat system will largely dictate SSN-21 effectiveness, costing $1.4 billion for development and production of the first three systems and involving over 3 million lines of software code; (2) development, integration, and testing of the combat system within the original 4-year development schedule will be difficult, since over 2 million lines of code will be written in relatively new Ada programming language; (3) a 1-year delay in completing the Critical Design Review further compressed the already tight development schedule; (4) the Navy based system development and production decisions on incomplete test and evaluation results; (5) late government-witnessed testing has left the Navy with limited time and flexibility to identify specific problems and bring them to the attention of the contractor for resolution without affecting system delivery; (6) the Navy did not ensure that major software component retesting was adequate to verify that other portions of such components were not adversely affected by software changes; (7) the contractor is experiencing problems in meeting start-up requirements in using a new standard Navy signal processor and preliminary estimates indicate that processing capacity may be inadequate; and (8) the Navy recently developed and implemented an independent verification and validation plan that meets federal guidance.

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.

Director: Team: Phone: