WASHINGTON – Government auditors issued a scathing review yesterday of dozens of the Pentagon's biggest weapons systems, saying ships, aircraft and satellites are billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
The Government Accountability Office found that 95 major systems have exceeded their original budgets by a total of $295 billion, bringing their total costs to $1.6 trillion, and are almost two years late on average. In addition, none of the systems that the GAO looked at had met all of the standards for best management practices during their development stages.
Auditors said the Defense Department showed few signs of improvement since the GAO began issuing its annual assessments of selected weapons systems six years ago.
“It's not getting any better by any means,” said Michael Sullivan, director of the GAO's acquisition and sourcing team. “It's taking longer and costing more.”
Chris Isleib, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement, “We'd like to look at what GAO has said, and then at the appropriate time make an informed comment.”
The Pentagon has almost doubled the amount it committed to new systems from $790 billion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion last year, according to the 205-page GAO report. Total acquisition costs in 2007 for major defense programs increased 26 percent from first estimates. In 2000, 75 programs had a 6 percent cost increase. Development costs for the systems rose 40 percent from what was initially expected, compared with 27 percent in 2000. Current programs are delivered 21 months late on average – five months later than programs were in 2000.
“In most cases, programs also failed to deliver capabilities when promised – often forcing war fighters to spend additional funds on maintaining” existing weapons systems, the report says.
The GAO chose to look at 72 systems on the basis of high-dollar value and congressional interest. The various systems were at different stages of the acquisition process over the past year.
The report details projects such as the Navy's $5.2 billion Littoral Combat Ship, which has had such extensive troubles that the service expects the cost of its first two ships to exceed their combined budget of $472 million by more than 100 percent. The Navy canceled construction of the planned third and fourth ships by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, the prime contractors on the project.
The government is facing higher development costs on eight major programs, including Lockheed Martin's Joint Strike Fighter and Boeing's Future Combat Systems, a technology to connect unmanned aircraft and vehicles. The initial contract price for those two programs has gone up 36 percent and 40 percent, respectively, the GAO said, partly because the government wants “new and unproven technologies” and did not undertake early analysis to make sure its requirements can be met.
In a statement, Lockheed said that the Joint Strike Fighter “is performing solidly, making outstanding technical progress in the context of the most complex aircraft ever built” and that “the bedrock and the cornerstone” of the F-35 program have been “affordability and cost containment.”
In another case, the initial contract target price of Boeing's program to modernize avionics in the C-130 cargo plane is expected to skyrocket 323 percent to $2 billion, and another Boeing program for a radio system is up 310 percent to $966 million.
“Boeing's commitment is to deliver on our promises to our military customers and meeting their requirements in the most cost-effective way possible,” the company said in a statement.
The GAO's Sullivan said the reasons for the cost overruns and delays in schedule with the Pentagon's weapons systems are threefold. There are too many programs chasing too few dollars. Technologies often are not mature enough to go into production. And the time it takes to design, develop and produce a system takes too long.
“They're asking for something that they're not sure can be built, given existing technologies, and that's risky,” Sullivan said.
Costs of some systems were driven up as much as 72 percent when changes were made to the program requirements after the development process had started, the report says. Half of the programs studied had 25 percent increases in the expected lines of code in their software.
