Depot Maintenance: Army Needs Plan to Implement Depot Maintenance Report's Recommendations
Highlights
Each year, the U.S. Army spends about $3 billion on depot-level maintenance and repair work for weapons systems and other equipment. However, because its data gathering and reporting processes have been limited, the Army historically has been unable to fully identify how much depotlevel maintenance takes place outside its five public depots. As a result, it has not been able to determine with precision how well it was meeting statutory requirements to limit contracted depot-level maintenance work to 50 percent of the program budget. In the House report on the Fiscal Year 2001 Defense Authorization Act, Congress directed the Army to report on the proliferation of depot-level maintenance work at nondepot facilities and asked GAO to review that report. GAO examined the extent to which (1) the Army's report identifies the amount of depot-level maintenance work done outside public depots; (2) the Army can account for its depot-level maintenance workload, as required by statute; and (3) the corrective actions in the report are likely to address the proliferation issue and enhance the Army's reporting.
Recommendations
Recommendations for Executive Action
| Agency Affected | Recommendation | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Department of Defense | To ensure the timely and effective implementation of the recommendations in the Army's 2003 proliferation report to help the Army improve its management of maintenance operations, including the proliferation of depot-level maintenance facilities, and more precisely capture and report depot-level maintenance data, the Secretary of the Defense should direct the Secretary of the Army to establish a specific plan to manage the implementation of the 29 recommendations identified in the 2003 proliferation report. The plan should include the priority and time frames for implementation, the responsible organizations for implementing the plan, and the criteria for measuring success. |
Closed – Implemented
In commenting on GAO's draft report, the Department of Defense concurred with this recommendation. The Department noted that the Army was in the process of establishing a team to develop an action plan. In performing our review of Army and Marine Corps depot maintenance operations, we determined that over the past few years the Army has relied on its depots significantly to support the ongoing war on terrorism and recognized the importance of the depot system to the successful support of future contingencies. Therefore, the Army has developed a depot maintenance strategic plan that identifies a strategy and plan of action for for improving the capability of the Army depot maintenance system to support legacy and emerging new weapon systems.
|