The Defense Division (DoD) demands to pick up the rate on its progress and shipping and delivery of weapon methods program or confront the possibility of Pentagon systems lacking out on the gains of modernization, according to the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) yearly evaluation of DoD’s weapons acquisitions.
DoD has been building on modernization initiatives around the earlier year, with DoD leadership emphasizing essential procedures, GAO claimed.
“However, most of the 39 plans that claimed working with a contemporary application progress method provide doing work computer software for consumer suggestions additional bit by bit than proposed by industry’s Agile procedures, which simply call for rapid, regular shipping and delivery of software program and speedy responses cycles,” wrote GAO.
GAO also found that cybersecurity for weapons units is a important location for DoD that desires to be enhanced, and that DoD systems are not thoroughly employing advisable cybersecurity methods.
In this year’s yearly report, GAO analyzed 63 of DoD’s costliest weapon procedure acquisition applications, together with:
- 40 major defense acquisition plans (MDAP)
- 4 future major weapon acquisitions and
- 19 courses using the center tier of acquisition pathway for fast prototyping and speedy fielding initiatives.
The report notes that MDAPs carry on to struggle with schedule delays and that more than fifty percent of the 29 MDAPs haven’t sent capacity claimed delays. A lack of foreseeable future year funding data in the fiscal yr 2022 budget request prevented GAO from examining the MDAP portfolio’s cost overall performance this 12 months.
GAO made two recommendations to DoD, each of which ended up agreed to. They are:
- Updating DoD’s industrial base evaluation instruction to determine the situations that would represent a acknowledged or projected problem or danger and
- Updating DoD’s industrial foundation assessment instruction and acquisition guidelines to specify industrial foundation evaluation necessities that use to courses using AAF pathways.
DoD’s struggles in modernizing weapon systems application aren’t new. Very last year, GAO’s yearly evaluation uncovered that DoD was struggling to put into action and execute modern day software package progress practices.
“DOD created initiatives to enhance in these spots, these as doing the job to update its application and cybersecurity recommendations and provide direction on Agile software package improvement tactics,” the 2021 report mentioned. “However, we located that the greater part of applications we surveyed proceed to deal with troubles in executing modern-day program advancement methods and quite a few courses we surveyed are challenged in employing iterative and early cybersecurity assessments.”