Army Training

Long-standing Control Problems Hinder the CAPSTONE Program Gao ID: NSIAD-92-261 September 30, 1992

The Army's CAPSTONE program has tried to improve readiness by aligning active and reserve units with wartime commands and by identifying units' anticipated wartime missions. These alignments are meant to serve mainly as a basis for peacetime training. GAO reported a decade ago that wartime commands did not always provide mission guidance to some of their subordinate units. Consequently, some of these units had no idea what missions would be expected of them during wartime. Moreover, the extent of this problem could not be determined because the Army lacked an adequate information system. Because of inadequate controls over the CAPSTONE program, the Army still lacks an effective way of identifying units that are not aligned with a wartime command. As a result, the Army was unaware that, since 1989, at least 116 active and reserve units did not have a CAPSTONE alignment. This report details the Army's controls to: (1) align active and reserve units with a wartime command; (2) identify unaligned units and take appropriate action; (3) provide aligned units with wartime mission guidance; and (4) monitor CAPSTONE's effectiveness.

GAO found that: (1) the Army has no systematic means to identify unaligned units or procedures to report that information to Army headquarters organizations responsible for force planning decisions; (2) in 1991, nearly 13 percent of units eligible for a CAPSTONE alignment lacked mission guidance more than 2 years after the Army last made CAPSTONE alignments; (3) the problems that have hindered CAPSTONE effectiveness result primarily from weaknesses in the Army's system of internal controls; (4) the largest of these weaknesses is an inadequate management information system; and (5) many of the same weaknesses that GAO found in 1982 still exist.

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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