Army Modernization

The Army developed the Warfighting Rapid Acquisition Program (WRAP) to speed up the fielding of urgently needed new technologies to the solider. WRAP is intended to help jump-start technologies that were still under development but nearing the production phase. Two years after the program was established, there is growing uncertainty about which technologies should receive priority for WRAP funding. The Army's criteria for candidates were open-ended and do not ensure that initiatives share a common set of characteristics. The Army may find it increasingly difficult to identify candidates that are sufficiently developed in the near future because it has reduced large-scale test and experimentation exercises and will thus have less data with which to assess new WRAP candidates. The Army has not presented its slate of WRAP candidates for congressional approval early enough in the fiscal year to permit the timely obligation of funds. This has led to delays in fielding because estimates were predicated on earlier availability of funds. Although some technologies may be fielded sooner because of WRAP, in most cases, the program will not speed up fielding as much as originally expected. The Army is required to report quarterly to Congress on the status of funding obligations, but so far it has not met this requirement. In GAO's view, Congress is being asked to make funding decisions without all the information that it needs.

GAO noted that: (1) the Army's criteria for selecting WRAP candidates are open-ended and allow room for different interpretations; (2) as a result, although the Army initially justified WRAP funding on the basis of the need to urgently field technologies associated with the first digitized division, not all WRAP initiatives support the first digitized division; (3) furthermore, some initiatives do not meet all the Army's criteria for WRAP funding; (4) the Army is reducing the testing of new technologies through large-scale warfighting experiments; (5) as a result, the Army may need to change the criteria used to evaluate and rate WRAP candidates; (6) this may affect the quality of future candidates; (7) to date, the Army has not been able to finalize its selection of WRAP candidates early enough to ensure timely approval by Congress; (8) as a result, the final approval of funds and the subsequent start-up of initiatives have been delayed; (9) delays also occurred because the Army did not obtain the timely release of WRAP funds from the Department of Defense (DOD) and because DOD reduced funding for WRAP; (10) in spite of these delays, GAO believes that WRAP funds may still help speed the fielding of some new technologies, though not as much as originally estimated; (11) after initial congressional approval of the first 11 WRAP initiatives, the Army made substantial changes to some of them; (12) these changes affected program implementation; and (13) Congress was not informed of the changes because current reporting requirements do not require the Army to report such changes.

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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