Prepositioned Materiel and Equipment: DOD Would Benefit from Developing Strategic Guidance and Improving Joint Oversight

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "DOD's fiscal year 2011 report partly addressed the required reporting elements and omitted some additional information that, while not required by law, would be useful for congressional oversight and decision making. Specifically, DOD's report addressed the first five required elements. However, information on the sixth element was incomplete because, while DOD highlighted concerns relative to the commands' theater objectives and strategies and prepositioned materiel and equipment, DOD's report did not provide a list of operation plans affected by a shortfall in prepositioned stocks and a description of actions taken to mitigate risk. In addition, DOD's report did not address the six elements added by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. DOD officials said that those elements were not addressed in DOD's fiscal year 2011 report because the report was already drafted when the requirements were enacted last December, and they plan to address these elements in their next annual report. DOD's report also did not contain some additional information on prepositioned materiel and equipment, which we recommended in our May 2011 report because it would provide a fuller scope of DOD's prepositioning programs. For example, the services place fuel distribution equipment and medical materiel and equipment and other capability sets--including water, habitability equipment such as tents, electrical power and distribution equipment, munitions and rations, among other items--that were not addressed in DOD's report. Without full information on all 12 reporting requirements and complete information on the services' prepositioned materiel and equipment, congressional decision makers do not have a complete picture of DOD's prepositioned materiel and equipment, which would enable them to provide oversight and would inform decisions in a constrained fiscal environment.