DOD'S Mobility Requirements

Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm underscored the need to quickly deliver combat forces and their support to theaters of operation other than Europe. To ensure that a sufficient amount of mobility assets would be available to support contingencies in the post-Cold War environment, Congress directed the Pentagon to assess both intertheater and intratheater lift requirements and to develop an integrated plan to meet them. Army officials said that the Defense Department (DOD) plans to spend $1.7 billion through fiscal year 2003 to implement the Army's tactical wheeled vehicle acquisition plan, as recommended in the Intratheater Lift Analysis. If the airlift recommendations in the analysis were implemented as well, another $2.7 billion could be spent. This report discusses whether (1) the analysis and recommendations in the study were appropriately linked, (2) the study considered all options in meeting the requirements for various lift assets, and (3) improvements could enhance the study's value as a decision-making tool.

GAO noted that: (1) the ILA does not adequately fulfill the congressional directive to determine lift requirements and develop an integrated plan to meet them; (2) the study contains recommendations that would cost billions of dollars to implement, but the study's analysis generally did not support these recommendations; (3) the disconnect between the analysis and recommendations is especially evident in the information regarding tactical wheeled vehicles and outsize airlift capability; (4) in addition, the study's analysis did not incorporate several assets that can contribute significantly to the intratheater lift mission; as a result, the study's requirements and solutions may be overstated; (5) the analysis did not consider: (a) commercial vehicles provided by host nation support (HNS); (b) the use of the current and planned fleet of outsize-capable intertheater airlifters such as the C-5 and C-17; and (c) the extent to which Army watercraft could reduce the need for alternative sources of lift; (6) furthermore, improvements could enhance the study's value to decisionmakers; (7) these improvements include requirements stated as a range rather than as absolute numbers and tradeoff assessments based on the cost and capability of the various lift assets; (8) a range would have better reflected the dynamic nature of intratheater requirements, and system tradeoff assessments would have provided choices based on cost and capability; and (9) the 1999 Mobility Requirements Study and updated ILA will afford DOD a good opportunity to address these issues and provide Congress with a basis for acquisition decisionmaking in future budget cycles.

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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