Army Acquisition

The Longbow Hellfire is an air-to-ground missile designed to be fired from a modified Apache helicopter. Testing showed the missile to be operationally effective and suitable. However, the Army's current requirements of 12,722 missiles may be overstated by more than 8,300 missiles. The Army made computational errors and a questionable assumption that resulted in an overstatement of about 7,100 missiles, and test results suggest that the missile quantity could be reduced by nearly 1,200 more missiles. Although cost estimates for cutting 8,300 missiles are not yet available, the Defense Department believes that it could save up to $500 million by eliminating 4,000 of these weapons.

GAO noted that: (1) the Apache Longbow weapon system, which includes the Longbow Hellfire missile, completed initial operational test and evaluation in March 1995; (2) the tests concluded that the system was operationally effective and suitable; (3) however, the Army's current Longbow Hellfire missile requirement of 12,722 may be overstated by over 8,300 missiles; (4) the Army made computational errors and a questionable assumption in calculating missile requirements that resulted in a potential overstatement of 7,145 missiles; (5) in addition, test results indicate that the missile quantity could be reduced by another 1,184 missiles; (6) moreover, significant cost reductions can be achieved with lower missile quantities; (7) while cost estimates for an 8,300-missile quantity reduction are not yet available, the Office of the Secretary of Defense estimates that up to $500 million in program cost savings can be achieved by reducing quantities by approximately 4,000 units; (8) the Army's method of computing the quantities contains three critical errors; (9) the Army used an outdated helicopter carrying capability of 16 missiles instead of the current 12, double counted missiles when figuring the residual readiness portion of the requirement, and used an unsubstantiated mix ratio between the Longbow Hellfire and Hellfire II missiles; (10) correcting these mistakes would potentially reduce the current 12,722-missile requirement for Longbow Hellfire missiles by 7,145 missiles; (11) in addition, the Army Materiel System Analysis Activity's independent evaluation of the Apache Longbow weapon system disclosed that the Apache Longbow system's weight needs to be reduced by almost 600 pounds to achieve its vertical rate of climb specification; (12) according to Army data, the system's current demonstrated capability is calculated using 8 missiles instead of 12; and (13) if the Army lowers its missile carrying capability to 8 to meet the Apache Longbow system weight limitation, this would further reduce the missile requirement by 1,184.

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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