Defense ADP

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) Computer-Aided Acquisition and Logistics Support (CALS) initiative to reduce the cost of maintenance and support by automating the millions of pages of technical data needed to support weapons systems.

GAO found that: (1) the potential benefits of CALS could be significant, especially in the repair and maintenance of weapons and procurement of spare parts; (2) individual projects are not separately identified in an overall plan or budget, making it difficult to determine how much is being spent on CALS; (3) there are numerous projects ongoing or planned by the services, totalling more than $5.2 billion, but it is not clear how those projects relate to overall CALS goals or to each other; (4) the centralized CALS policy and decentralized implementation approach was intended to stimulate CALS development in as many areas as possible, but the lack of an overall plan resulted in the services' differing opinions on what CALS should be, what it should encompass, and how it should be implemented; (5) during the past 5 years, DOD made progress in developing standards for exchange of CALS-compliant data, which are essential if DOD is to receive and use technical data from different computer systems; and (6) clear goals and a DOD-wide plan would focus CALS efforts to eliminate redundancy and duplication, build standard systems where practical, and ensure that the funds available for CALS development and implementation are optimized.

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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