Federal Manager's Daily Report

The Defense Information Systems Agency needs to provide quicker, faster and more cost effective bandwidth procurement services if it wants to remain the Defense Department’s primary agent, the General Accounting Office has said.

DoD acquires commercial satellite bandwidth services to support missions such as surveillance by unmanned aerial vehicles, said GAO.

It said senior leaders within DISA and DoD would need to come up with a strategic a management approach to strengthen oversight and management, including establishing performance metrics to gauge user response and develop internal technical expertise.

GAO determined that while the acquisitions process is fair to DoD’s vendors and their subcontractors, some major DoD users are dissatisfied, causing over 20% of users to bypass the DISA process altogether, which hampers the department’s ability to prevent redundancies and ensure that its communications networks are interoperable.

DoD, which has for many years augmented its internally owned and operated satellite communications capabilities by leasing commercial fixed satellite bandwidth services primarily through DISA, generally agreed the report: Get Report