Summary: Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed selected Department of Defense (DOD) computer procurements to determine whether they included any barriers to full and open competition for U.S. computer suppliers, focusing on the: (1) Air Force's procurement of the Tactical Air Force Workstation (TAF-WS); and (2) Army's procurement of the Lightweight Computer Unit (LCU).
GAO found that the: (1) solicitations for the Air Force TAF-WS and the Army LCU procurements included 12 specifications that restricted competition by specifying requirements in terms of solutions rather than in functional terms or by requiring a brand-name product; (2) Air Force and the Army adequately justified 9 of the 12 restrictive specifications; (3) three unjustified specifications required all TAF-WS units to have the same hardware architecture, operating system, and compilers, and required LCU to use brand-name products to physically connect the computer to other devices and make the computer more user-compatible; and (4) Air Force did not thoroughly evaluate alternative approaches to a restrictive specification for achieving efficient and effective software maintenance.
