New GAO Report on Military Depots
The Government Accountability Office yesterday issued a new report entitled “GAO-20-401 Military Depots: Army and Marine Corps Need to Improve Efforts to Address Challenges in Measuring Performance and Planning Maintenance Work”.
According to the GAO, “The Army and Marine Corps operate large industrial depots to maintain, overhaul, and upgrade weapon systems and equipment. Delays at depots reduce the available time for operations and training with tanks, radars, and other weapons and equipment. Both services reported largely meeting depot maintenance goals in recent years. We found ways they could improve depot performance measures and efficiency. The Army, for example, could do more to better plan the flow of work to depots.”
The GAO went on to advise that they “…made four recommendations to the Army and one to the Marine Corps, including ways to more comprehensively assess depot performance and address weaknesses.” The recommendations included:
- “Recommendation 1: The Secretary of the Army should ensure that the Commander, Army Materiel Command, develops procedures to help ensure that it will incorporate depot stakeholder input into the new metrics framework for the Army's organic industrial base through iterative and ongoing processes.
- Recommendation 2: The Commandant of the Marine Corps should ensure that the Marine Corps Logistics Command establishes a complete baseline schedule, which includes all planned depot maintenance work for the fiscal year, against which to measure performance.
- Recommendation 3: The Secretary of the Army should ensure that the Commander, Army Materiel Command, develops guidance that synchronizes the Army's timelines for required inputs from Army depot maintenance customers who use funds from the Procurement; Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation; and Operations and Maintenance budgets with the depots' timelines for development of their finalized budget estimate submissions to AMC.
- Recommendation 4: The Secretary of the Army should ensure that the Commander, Army Materiel Command, provides its non-Army customers with guidance that will help ensure that the depots have all updated maintenance needs in sufficient detail from non-Army customers prior to the depots' finalized budget estimate submissions to AMC.”