Electronic Combat

This report reviews the Defense Department's (DOD) electronic combat consolidation master plan, which established a DOD-wide infrastructure for electronic combat testing. According to the master plan, DOD considered 17 of the military's electronic combat test facilities for consolidation. The Army controls four of the facilities, the Navy six, and the Air Force seven. The master plan proposed that the assets of three of the seven Air Force facilities--located in Fort Worth, Texas; Buffalo, New York; and Eglin Air Force Base, Florida--be moved to other Air Force locations. No consolidations were suggested for the Army and Navy facilities. This report assesses the costs and benefit of DOD's consolidation plans for open air ranges, hardware-in-the-loop facilities, and installed system test facilities used in electronic combat testing.

GAO noted that: (1) implementation of the Electronic Combat Consolidation Master Plan will result in less effective electronic combat testing capabilities; (2) the planned relocation of the Electro-Magnetic Test Environment will eliminate DOD's current capability to test electronic combat systems in conditions that typify many potential threat locations; (3) DOD will be left with two open air ranges with very similar environmental characteristics and will no longer have the ability to test in diverse conditions needed to understand environmental effects on electronic combat systems; (4) the planned Real-time Electronic Digitally Controlled Analyzer Processor relocation will mean replacing existing hardware simulation capability with digital computer models, thus reducing DOD's current capability to simulate realistic aircraft strike scenarios with high confidence and fidelity; (5) the Master Plan did not contain any cost analysis and did not identify any savings expected from the consolidations; (6) estimates used to support 1995 Base Closure and Realignment Commission deliberations, as well as data provided by users, indicate that the consolidation may increase DOD's electronic combat testing costs; (7) in addition, the Master Plan does not contain any analysis or recommendations regarding consolidation of installed system test facility workloads across the services although the Navy and the Air Force are spending $512 million for construction of another anechoic chamber to provide a controlled electromagnetic environment, and other upgrades to their current primary installed system test facilities; (8) consequently, the Master Plan, if implemented, may not achieve the most cost-effective DOD-wide infrastructure; (9) the root cause of this was DOD officials' inability to overcome service parochialism during the Master Plan's development; (10) this parochialism resulted in a gentleman's agreement between the Air Force and the Navy to focus on intraservice rather than interservice consolidations; (11) prior joint service studies performed on an interservice basis had identified alternatives for more cost-effective consolidations; (12) however, the recommendations of these studies were never implemented; and (13) if this continues, service rivalry could adversely affect DOD's ongoing, congressionally mandated Section 277/Vision 21 consolidation effort, which is considering the broader issue of DOD's testing and laboratory facilities.

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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