Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO examined the Department of the Navy's Fleet Modernization Program (FMP), the Navy's primary vehicle for updating ships' offensive, defensive, and operating systems.
GAO found that the Navy: (1) fiscal year (FY) 1987 FMP budget request was $1.6 billion, which included about $958 million for 2,278 modernization projects on 244 ships; (2) did not install about 29 percent of those projects as part of the FY 1987 program; (3) cancelled or moved modernization work on 32 ships to another year's program; (4) added 53 ships to the FY 1987 program after submitting its FY 1987 budget to Congress; (5) did not meet some installation schedules, mostly due to deficient plans, resulting in deployment delays for 32, or 13 percent, of the ships included in the FY 1987 program; (6) decommissioned 9 frigates in FY 1988 and FY 1989 after spending about $9.9 million installing new equipment as part of the FY 1987 FMP; and (7) did not maintain accurate and complete records to plan modernization work and measure program results, even though it had procedures and management information systems designed to capture those data.
