Logistics Planning

Opportunities for Enhancing DOD's Logistics Strategic Plan Gao ID: NSIAD-97-28 December 18, 1996

The Pentagon recognizes that its logistics system, designed decades ago to support the U.S. military in a global war, is slow, complicated, redundant, and costly. With the end of the Cold War and the advent of shrinking military budgets, the Defense Department's (DOD) logistics system must now support a smaller, highly mobile, high-tech force as efficiently as possible. DOD in 1994 developed a logistics strategic plan to promote a better, faster, more reliable, highly mobile, and cheaper strategy for delivering logistics material and services to users. This report reviews DOD's logistics strategic plan and identifies opportunities for increasing the likelihood of implementing the plan's goals and objectives successfully.

GAO found that: (1) DOD's plan gives direction to improvements that are needed to reduce the costs of its logistics system (i.e., reducing logistics cycle times, developing a seamless logistics system, and streamlining the logistics infrastructure) and lays out specific objectives and strategies to produce these improvements; (2) DOD could build on its plan and increase the likelihood of implementing its goals and objectives successfully, as well as be better prepared for implementing the requirements of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, if the plan: (a) linked its action plans to resources so that both DOD managers and Congress can make more informed decisions on the value and priority of logistics system improvements; (b) better linked the services' and the Defense Logistics Agency's (DLA) plans to DOD's plan; and (c) identified interim approaches that can be developed and implemented when milestones of a priority strategy, aimed at achieving the plan's overall goals and objectives, have been extended; and (3) DOD's success in bringing these elements together hinges on its top-level managers' continued and visible support of efforts to remove institutional cultural barriers.

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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