Defense Weapons Systems Acquisition

Many GAO audit reports have spotlighted the effect of management failures in the federal government--waste, inefficiency, and even scandal. Political leaders have been forced to spend too much time reacting to surprises like the Department of Housing and Urban Development debacle rather than doing the work the agencies were created to do. GAO began its high-risk program to identify those high-dollar government programs most vulnerable to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. This report is part of the program's high-risk series of reports, which examine the federal government's efforts to identify and correct problems in 17 especially vulnerable areas, fall into three main categories: lending and insuring, contracting, and accountability. Many of the root causes of the problems afflicting these government programs are traceable to the absence of fundamental processes and systems. GAO urges that future congressional oversight focus on the agency reports and audited financial statements required by the Chief Financial Officers Act, agency management's progress in correcting material weaknesses in program internal control and accounting systems, and federal agency efforts to develop and implement performance standards. The Comptroller General summarized the high-risk series in testimony before Congress; see: Government Management--Report on 17 High-Risk Areas, by Charles A. Bowsher, Comptroller General of the United States, before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. GAO/T-OCG-93-2, Jan. 8, 1993 (22 pages).

GAO found that: (1) while the services conduct considerable analyses to justify major acquisitions, these analyses were narrowly focused, and did not fully consider alternative solutions, including the joint acquisition of systems with other services; (2) cost growth and schedule delays were among the oldest and most visible problems associated with DOD weapon system acquisition; (3) DOD tendency to overestimate the amount of future funding available for defense, and underestimate program costs, has resulted in program acquisition strategies that are unreasonable or risky at best; (4) the most troublesome characteristic of DOD acquisition strategies was the high degree of concurrency between the development and production of weapons; (5) DOD has compromised or not adequately considered design considerations such as reliability, maintainability, and logistics support during the acquisition process.