The Defense Department and individual service agencies all need to come up with a roadmap for reducing the time it takes to award weapons-systems contracts, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) stated in a July 16 report.
Looking at 129 different weapons systems-related contracts, GAO found that the approval processes ranged from less than a month to as long as four years. The report also noted that each Defense Department component measured the time it took to award contracts differently. The discrepancy made it difficult to compare data. The Pentagon needs to “develop a strategy that identifies the information it needs to collect and how it will use the information to assess contract award time frames,” the report stated.
