In the last 5 years, the Department of Defense (DOD) has doubled its planned investments in new weapon systems from about $700 billion in 2001 to nearly $1.4 trillion in 2006. While the weapons that DOD develops have no rival in superiority, weapon systems acquisition remains a long-standing high risk area. GAO’s reviews over the past 30 years have found consistent problems with weapon acquisitions such as cost increases, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls.

This report provides congressional and DOD decision makers with an independent, knowledge-based assessment of selected defense programs that identifies potential risks and needed actions when a program's projected attainment of knowledge diverges from the best practices.

GAO assessed 52 systems that represent an investment of over $850 billion, ranging from the Missile Defense Agency’s Airborne Laser to the Army’s Warfighter Information Network-Tactical. DOD often exceeds development cost estimates by approximately 30 to 40 percent and experiences cuts in planned quantities, missed deadlines, and performance shortfalls. Such difficulties, absent definitive and effective reform outcomes, are likely to cause great turmoil in a budget environment in which there are growing fiscal imbalances as well as increasing conflict over increasingly limited resources. While these problems are in themselves complex, they are heightened by the fact that this current level of investment is by no means final and unchangeable. A large number of the technologies under development in these systems are sufficiently new and immature that it is uncertain how long it will take or how much it will cost to make them operational.

Most of the 52 programs GAO reviewed have proceeded with lower levels of knowledge than suggested by best practices. Programs that start with mature technologies do better. As shown in the figure below, programs that began with immature technologies have experienced average research and development cost growth of 34.9 percent; programs that began with mature technologies have only experienced cost growth of 4.8 percent.

There are a lot of programs in the DoD portfolio. This report provides a good snapshot of the largest and most important ones. Here's a typical nugget:

The Air Force has not demonstrated the F-22A can achieve its reliability goal of 3 hours mean time between maintenance. It does not expect to achieve this goal until the end of 2009 when most of the aircraft will have already been bought.

Is it just me, or does that seem like a rather modest reliability goal? What about when the mission calls for refueling by tanker? And yet, this is said to represent as much as a 100% improvement over other fighters in the inventory.

An earlier GAO report explains further:

Mean time between maintenance is a measure of aircraft reliability defined as the total number of aircraft flight hours divided by the total number of aircraft maintenance actions in the same period. The F-22's goal is 3 flight hours between maintenance actions by the time the F-22 reaches system maturity (100,000 flight hours, in about 2008).

The Air Force estimates that by the time the F-22 reaches system maturity, it will only require maintenance every 3.1 flight hours. The estimate was calculated using a reliability computer model that uses factors such as the design of the aircraft's systems and scheduled maintenance activities. Maintenance data will be collected from the 500th through the 5,000th hour of flight testing throughout the development and operational flight-testing phases to update the maintenance estimate.