After the Missile Defense Agency’s (MDA) successful target performances and flight test failures in fiscal year 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that without addressing and reducing “highly concurrent” acquisitions, the agency will continue to experience acquisition problems.
For example, a design problem in a new Ground-Based Midcourse Defense interceptor while the missiles were being produced caused costs to rise, the auditors said.
“Flight test cost to confirm its capability has increased from $236 million to about $1 billion,” the report said.
GAO assessors made seven recommendations, of which the Defense Department agreed with six and partially agreed with the seventh.
In FY 2011, GAO said, for the first time in five years, all the targets MDA used were delivered and performed as expected.
However, “none of the programs GAO assessed were able to fully accomplish their asset delivery and capability goals for the year.”
Issues ranged from failed flight tests to an anomaly and those delays disrupted some component development. Model and simulation issues remain, said the GAO-12-486 report, “Missile Defense: Opportunity Exists to Strengthen Acquisitions by Reducing Concurrency.”
Additionally, flight test failures caused MDA to suspend or slow production of three of four interceptors in production, while failure reviews investigated the failures.
MDA undertakes concurrent acquisitions–defined by GAO as the overlap among developing technology, products, and production–to meet presidential directions: in 2002 to rapidly field and update missile defense capabilities by 2004 and then a directive in 2009 to deploy missile defenses in Europe.
Since 2002, the National Defense Authorization Acts require GAO prepare annual assessments of MDA’s cost, schedule test and performance progress.
However, the report said, MDA has begun to implement knowledge based development instead of concurrency, where technology development is followed by product development that is then followed by production with no overlap.
Most impacted by concurrency were the GMD, Aegis Standard Missile 3 Block IB and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) programs.
MDA suspended production of an interceptor in the GMD program and one in the Aegis BMD program, and slowed production of a third interceptor in the Aegis BMD program. Additionally, development problems with a key THAAD component disrupted that program’s interceptor production.