Electronic Warfare

The Navy has spent more than $300 million for thousands of design changes to correct deficiencies and improve the primary electronic warfare system that protects ships against incoming missiles, yet the system's abilities remain doubtful. The Navy has spent upwards of $1.7 billion to acquire the SLQ-32 and plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to buy more systems despite indications that the system has serious flaws. Fleet commanders have rejected the SLQ-32 systems installed on their ships as unworkable. This situation has arisen primarily because of the Pentagon's lack of control over the Navy's acquisition process and the Navy's failure to fully disclose SLQ-32 deficiencies. These problems will only worsen if the Navy moves ahead and buys more of these flawed and untested systems.

GAO found that: (1) the Navy approved production of the SLQ-32 system before correcting problems disclosed in the system's initial operational tests and verifying the system's satisfactory performance; (2) the Navy has deployed the defective SLQ-32 system while attempting to correct its deficiencies; (3) the Navy is unable to maintain and support the system because it does not know which system configuration is on which ship; (4) the Navy plans to acquire additional units and modifications although it has not adequately tested the system's performance; (5) the Department of Defense (DOD) lacks adequate internal controls over the Navy's acquisition process and has failed to verify that systematic problems have been corrected; and (6) DOD has relied on incomplete and inaccurate data from the Navy that the system is effective and suitable for deployment.

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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