The United States has increasingly failed in attempts to launch mock enemy missiles for its test interceptors to destroy, congressional investigators said in a report released Friday (see GSN, March 18).
The rate of failed target launches rose from 7 percent from 2002 to 2005 to 16 percent from 2006 to 2007, the report states, pointing to the flagging reliably of aging rockets as a likely cause, Time magazine reported.
In addition, a $1 billion effort to develop more effective, reliable test targets has produced a new generation of mock warheads vastly more expensive than older counterparts, auditors said in the report. Target launches slated to take place over the next two years are each expected to cost $48.5 million on average, while targets fired between 2002 and 2006 carried an average price tag of $6.5 million.
The Defense Department has partly attributed the higher cost to the new targets' use of balloons and other evasion measures to "better reflect an evolving threat." However, design flaws in the new targets and the program's lack of a formal expense analysis have also inflated costs, auditors said, noting the department had boosted hourly compensation by 32 percent after outsourcing work to the defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. in 2003.
"The magnitude of the increase ... exceeded expectations," the report states.
The Defense Department's "difficulty in supplying targets is driven by diminishing sources for components, unanticipated costs, problems incorporating requirements into contracts and establishing program baselines, and the lack of a sound business case for its current approach to supplying targets," GAO auditors said.
Many firms that had constructed rockets for the department "are leaving the market due to a lack of business," the report states.
"Target anomalies" have forced cancellations of two recent interceptor tests. In one case this month, a test failed "because the target missile malfunctioned and did not have enough momentum to reach the intercept area," investigators said (see GSN, Sept. 18).
"Developmental problems have risen in the new family of targets," the report adds, "leading to cost growth, delayed flight tests and deferral of several key capabilities" (Mark Thompson, Time, Sept. 29).