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GCN Home > 07/03/06 issue

Weapons projects misfire on software

Cost overruns constrict already tight budgets, GAO says

By Patience Wait, GCN Staff

Every year the Government Accountability Office issues a report that gives a brief summary of the status of major weapons acquisition programs. And every year the reports say that many, if not most, of those acquisition programs are experiencing cost overruns and schedule delays in their software development segments.

The problem is huge. In fiscal 2006, the Defense Department will spend as much as $12 billion on reworking software—30 percent of its estimated budget of $40 billion for research, development, testing and evaluation. By comparison, Motorola—and other large commercial companies—spends just a small percent of its budget on rework.

Nor can the significance of the problem be overlooked. In its summary for 2006, Assessments of Selected Major Weapon Programs (GCN.com, Quickfind 605), GAO pointed out that, in the past five years, “DOD has doubled its planned investments in new weapons systems from $700 [billion] to $1.4 trillion. This huge increase has not been accompanied by more stability, better outcomes or more buying power for the acquisition dollar.”

The huge difference between military and private-sector efforts, according to Carol Mebane and Cheryl Andrew of GAO’s weapons acquisition audits practice, exists because corporations use a structured, replicable approach to software development that emphasizes requirements planning upfront.

A few years ago, the two auditors spent months studying how commercial best practices could be applied to DOD projects to control both cost factors and schedule delays. They spoke to an audience of software and systems engineers at the Software and Systems Technology Conference in May, revisiting the conclusions of their 2004 report, Stronger Management Practices Are Needed to Improve DOD’s Software-intensive Weapon Acquisitions (GCN.com, Quickfind 606).

The importance of improving software development efficiency can’t be overstated, Mebane said. When DOD developed the F-4 fighter in the 1960s, less than 10 percent of its functionality was based on software; in today’s development of the F/A-22, it’s more than 80 percent.

The Joint Strike Fighter program—one of those included in this year’s report—has seen R&D overruns totaling 30 percent. Despite that, when it’s time for DOD to make a production decision on the JSF, “the program will have released about 35 percent of the software needed for the system,” GAO found.

More news on related topics: Acquisition / Contracts, Defense IT, IT Management



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