The Department of Defense needs better management and
oversight of its supply pre-positioning program, the
Government Accountability Office has said.
It said long-standing problems are systematic of inventory
and recent supply chain management issues that it has
considered high risk for over a decade, and that “DoD faces
some near-term operational risks should another large-scale
conflict emerge because it has drawn heavily on its
pre-positioned stocks to support ongoing operations in Iraq.”
Insufficient oversight on the part of the department and the
military services has allowed long-standing problems with
determining program requirements and managing inventory to
continue, according to GAO-05-427.
It said DoD has not enforced a directive for centralized
oversight, and while DoD officials said they provide adequate
oversight in other ways, the report said requirements
underpinning some of DoD’s pre-positioning programs are
questionable and the services lack information on the
inventory level and maintenance condition of some stocks.
In its recently published defense strategy, DoD said the
programs need to be more flexible and innovative, but
according to GAO, “in the absence of a department-wide plan
or joint doctrine to coordinate the reconstitution and
future plans for these programs, the services have been
recapitalizing stocks and developing future plans without
an understanding of how the programs will fit together to
meet the evolving defense strategy.”
Without such a framework DoD cannot not ensure the billions
of dollars required to reconstitute stocks will be effective
or affordable, GAO said.
