IVAS Mounted Amplifies Capabilities

Soldiers don the Integrated Visual Augmentation System Capability Set 3 hardware while mounted in a Stryker in Joint Base Lewis-McCord, WA. (Courtney Bacon/US Army)

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department’s most expensive, advanced technology programs are by and large failing to deliver their promised capabilities on time and under budget, a problem that a government watchdog says helped drive taxpayer costs up by $37 billion over the past two years.

Those conclusions are from a new Government Accountability Office report published Thursday that reviewed the statuses of 101 Pentagon weapons programs ranging from the Army’s Precision Strike Missile and the Air Force’s B-52 Bomber to the Navy’s Virginia-class submarine and the Space Force’s Next Generation Operational Control System. GAO routinely reports on the Pentagon’s weapons systems in a report published annually.

“Over half of the 26 major defense acquisition programs GAO assessed that had yet to deliver operational capability reported new delays. Driving factors included supplier disruptions, software development delays, and quality control deficiencies,” according to the report.

“Net costs for the 32 major defense acquisition programs that GAO assessed both this year and last year increased by $37 billion. Rising modernization costs, production inefficiencies, and supply chain challenges drove the majority of costs,” the report continued.

The differences in the figures that GAO cites in this year’s report compare numbers the Pentagon produced in 2022 to those provided in 2020. GAO writes that the Defense Department did not submit these reports in 2021 due to a “lack of future year funding data in the fiscal year 2022 budget request.”

GAO’s reports take several months to compile and publish, meaning the information on individual programs can sometimes be dated or overtaken by events. But presented as a whole, the watchdog’s new report presents a damning indictment of the Pentagon’s programmatic stewardship.

“More than half of the MDAPs that we reviewed that have yet to deliver capabilities reported schedule slips over the past year. For many of these programs, this is the second or third year in a row in which they reported delays,” the watchdog wrote in the report’s attached letter to congressional leaders.

More from the GAO’s findings:

For the Army, GAO points to programs such as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2, the Extended Range Cannon Artillery and Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor radar. For the latter two, the report reveals that delays prompted the service to transition both out of rapid prototyping efforts and into the major capability acquisition pathway because their development will exceed the five-year deadline.

DDG-1002

The Zumwalt-class destroyer Lyndon B. Johnson. (Photo courtesy of General Dynamics Bath Iron Works).

The Navy is feeling the long-anticipated pressures of attempting to build both Virginia-class and Columbia-class submarines, GAO reports. Program officials say their shipbuilders are facing labor shortages which is driving cost increases as well as program delays. Block V Virginia boats are now expected to be finished two years later than previously reported and the Navy intends to seek additional funding from Congress to complete the builds.

Separately, the testing schedule for the Navy’s premiere hypersonic weapon, Conventional Prompt Strike, is also threatening the timeline to integrate that weapon onto the service’s submarines and Zumwalt-class destroyers.

T-7A Red Hawk, Boeing image

The T-7A Red Hawk. (Image courtesy of Boeing)

The Air Force is hardly fairing any better. The service’s newest training jet, the T-7A Red Hawk, is over two years late with risks for further delays. Troubles with the KC-46A’s remote vision system have already dragged the program’s schedule out seven years, with more work needed before it can move into its full-rate production phase. And the Air Force’s replacement for Air Force One, the VC-25B, recently had its schedule rebaselined to reflect a more than 2-year delay, though GAO warned that more delays are possible as its testing proceeds.

Of the four major Space Force programs reviewed by the congressional watchdog, two long-troubled efforts — the Military GPS User Equipment Increment 1 to develop computer chips needed for GPS satellite receivers to use the encrypted M-code signal, and the Next Generation Operational Control System (OCX) ground system for GPS — continue to face delays, with schedules for both slipping from last year to next.

GAO looked at nine Space Force programs using MTA — an acquisition pathway that some have charged the service is over-using. Of those, two programs face delays that are likely to result in failing to meet their performance requirements within the five-year MTA deadline.

In particular, the Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution (FORGE) system to process data from both the Space Based Infrared System and Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next Gen OPIR) missile warning satellites is in serious trouble. GAO found that the Space Force program office already assumes that FORGE will not be fully complete until at least a year after the first Next-Gen OPIR satellite is launched.

Further, at least two more — the Space Force’s Protected Tactical SATCOM (PTS) and Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability (DARC) — face risks because there remains significant work to be done to mature their critical technologies, GAO said. Indeed, GAO estimates that DARC will take an additional year beyond the MTA deadline to deliver the first radar of three planned radar.

Ashley Roque, Michael Marrow and Theresa Hitchens contributed reporting to this story.