Army Acquisition

The integrated family of test equipment (IFTE) is a general-purpose automatic test equipment system intended to support Army electronic, missile, aircraft, and combat vehicles. To see whether Army analyses provide valid support for buying IFTE, GAO reviewed (1) the Army's 1989 and 1992 cost and operational effectiveness analyses for IFTE, (2) the 1990 cost-benefit analysis of the electro-optic augmentation for IFTE, and (3) the supporting data for these analyses.

GAO found that: (1) the cost and operational effectiveness analyses used to support a decision to buy IFTE were incomplete and included inaccurate information; (2) the 1989 analysis did not compare IFTE to feasible alternatives that may have been more cost-effective; (3) because of the high cost of contractor maintenance for the systems that do not have automatic test equipment, the Army considered the IFTE alternative more cost-effective; (4) the 1990 cost-benefit analysis did not demonstrate the cost-benefit advantage of IFTE electro-optical augmentation over the continued use of existing electro-optical test equipment or electro-optical augmentation of existing equipment; (5) in the 1989 analysis, the requirements for the number of Base Shop Test Facilities were less than what the Army needed to support its fielded and anticipated weapon systems and the Army further understated requirements because it based the work-load analysis on a peacetime operating demand level; (6) the Army inappropriately estimated the useful life of existing automatic test equipment when making cost comparisons; and (7) the Army overstated the Contact Test Set's cost-effectiveness because of inaccurate cost-saving estimates claimed for the Contact Test Set no-evidence-of-failure rate reductions.

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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