Brilliant Antiarmor Submunition

Opportunity Exists to Conduct Critical Test Prior to Production Decision Gao ID: NSIAD-98-16 October 30, 1997

The Army has been developing the brilliant antiarmor submunition since 1984 and plans to request authority to start low-rate initial production in December 1997. The Army is developing this weapon to track and destroy moving armored targets. This report assesses the status of the Army's acquisition plans and whether it is technically ready to enter production.

GAO noted that: (1) a decision on low-rate initial production of BAT, scheduled for December 1997, appears to be premature because a crucial technical demonstration will not be accomplished by that time; (2) in 1995, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Army agreed to relax the performance criteria that BAT was to meet before proceeding into low-rate initial production; (3) under the new criteria, the Army is not required to demonstrate that the submunition can be successfully dispensed from the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) Block II missile; (4) in September 1994, the Department of Defense (DOD) noted, in its comments to GAO's draft classified report, that the successful completion of multiple tests of the submunition with ATACMS as the carrier would be required; (5) the submunition's test schedule appears to be extremely ambitious; (6) its development program is almost 3 years behind its original schedule, and a significant portion of the test schedule remains uncompleted; (7) the project office added five development flight tests to the schedule because of technical problems; (8) the Army plans to use a test aircraft for all submunition flight testing with subsonic deployment rather than the supersonic deployment from the ATACMS missile; (9) the testing completed to date has uncovered numerous problems that required design changes, additional testing, and schedule delays; (10) although the submunition test plans do not include an evaluation of whether or not the ATACMS Block II can dispense the submunition, the Block II missile test plans do include a test to dispense tactical submunitions in December 1997, the same month that the decision is to be made on low-rate production of the submunition; (11) according to Army representatives, data from this test will not be used in making the submunition production decision, since the test is not required; (12) any delays in qualifying the submunition's subcomponents and developmental flight testing will likely postpone the date of the Block II dispense test; (13) the submunition's low-rate initial production contract can be awarded 8 months later than currently scheduled and still be delivered in time to be integrated into the missile; (14) the Block II missile's currently scheduled production date is uncertain; and (15) if its production date is delayed, the Army would have even more time to sufficiently complete key submunition developmental testing.

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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