The Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds a Defense Department report to congressional defense committees on the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system’s test program offers limited insight.
The April 30 report, GAO-14-350R, was to include an explanation of testing options if planned tests do not demonstrate the successful correction to a problem that caused a flight test failure in December 2010.
Also, the report was to provide an assessment of the “feasibility, advisability, and cost effectiveness” of accelerating GMD’s flight testing pace.
The GMD is a missile defense system being developed by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) to defend the United States against a limited intermediate and ICBM attack from nations such as North Korea and Iran.
DoD’s report included the development of one option to mitigate the vibration problem that was determined to be the root cause of the December 2010 GMD flight test failure.
But the report offered few details on how the option would be developed or tested.
“For example, it included few details about its (1) development and testing strategy, (2) cost, schedule, benefits, and risks, and (3) impact on new production and fielded ground-based interceptors,” the report said.
GAO requested additional information from DoD, but it was not provided in time to assess the development and testing plans for this option.
Also, there was a setback in July 2013, when an already fielded version of the GMD interceptor failed a flight test.
As a result, DoD’s testing options using that GMD fielded interceptor were limited.
“GAO believes that until DoD completes its ongoing failure review and determines the root cause, developing additional testing options using the GMD fielded interceptor would be premature,” the report said.
DoD’s report also provided “limited insight” to decision makers into the feasibility and no insight into the cost effectiveness of accelerating GMD’s testing pace.
DoD’s report did not provide a complete assessment as to whether it is feasible to increase GMD’s testing pace–limiting the report’s usefulness for decision makers.
In addition, although DoD’s report included some basic cost information, it did not provide decision makers with an assessment of whether increasing GMD’s testing pace could be cost effective.
The report provided insufficient information to assess whether accelerating GMD’s testing pace is prudent because it did not address the potential full cost, benefits, and risks of testing acceleration.
The DoD report to the defense committees and the GAO assessment was required by the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act.