GAO

United States General Accounting Office

Testimony

Before the Subcommittee on Readiness and Management 

Support, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate

For Release on Delivery

Expected at

2:30 p.m., EDT

Tuesday,

October 26, 1999

MILITARY REAL 

PROPERTY 

MAINTENANCE

Improvements Are Needed 

to Ensure That Critical 

Mission Facilities Are 

Adequately Maintained

Statement of Kwai-Cheung Chan, Director, Special Studies 

and Evaluations, National Security and International 

Affairs Division

GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

Page 1 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I am pleased to be here today to share the results of our examination of the 

management of real property assets by the Department of Defense (DOD) 

and the military services. The military services are collectively responsible 

for maintaining more real property than any other entity in the world—

more than 320,000 buildings (with about 2.1 billion square feet), tens of 

thousands of miles of roads, and 1.1 million square yards of pavement (like 

runways). The replacement value of this property is more than $500 billion. 

Real property facilities maintained by the services include barracks, 

administrative space, classrooms, ports, hangars and runways, roads and 

railroads, day care centers, schools and churches, and utility structures and 

systems. The annual maintenance and repair budget for these facilities has 

averaged about $5 billion for each of the past 4 years (fiscal years 1996-99). 

Separate accounts fund maintenance and repair of family housing, many 

industrial-related and military medical facilities.

As you know, DOD’s management of its properties has been of longstanding concern to the Congress. At your request, we reviewed DOD’s 

maintenance of its real property. We focused on the properties that the 

services maintain and repair using funds from DOD’s operation and 

maintenance account. Real property maintenance includes daily 

maintenance, small repairs, and minor construction. My testimony today is 

based on our September 1999 report to you on this subject.1

 I will discuss 

(1) whether DOD has a comprehensive strategy to address its real property 

maintenance needs; (2) how the services determine and prioritize 

maintenance needs and allocate resources to them; (3) promising practices 

in facilities maintenance by non-military entities that we identified; 

(4) some barriers that the services face in implementing such practices; 

and (5) our recommendations on how DOD could improve management of 

its real property maintenance to ensure that the military’s assets are 

maintained adequately and cost-effectively.

To meet our objectives, we sent questionnaires to 571 military bases and 

major commands worldwide; 93 percent of them responded. We visited 

35 bases and commands nationwide to interview experts and DOD 

maintenance and repair personnel. Our work was conducted from May 

1997 through March 1999.

1

See Military Infrastructure: Real Property Management Needs Improvement

(GAO/NSIAD-99-100, Sept. 7, 1999).
Page 2 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

Results in Brief DOD does not have a comprehensive strategy for managing its 

maintenance and repair needs. Although DOD planned to pay for 

development of an overall real property maintenance plan in fiscal 

year 1999, it shifted these funds to other priorities in early 1999. Similarly, 

although DOD instructed the services in 1997 to provide sufficient funding 

by 2003 to meet three-fourths of their estimated real property maintenance 

needs, DOD eliminated this goal in 1999, leaving it up to the services to 

decide how much to budget for maintenance.

In the absence of a comprehensive DOD strategy, each service sets its own 

standards for maintaining its property, using different methods to assess 

property conditions, prioritize repairs, and allocate funds for maintenance 

and repairs. As a result, a barracks rated “satisfactory” by one service could 

be rated as “unsatisfactory” by another. Also, bases and major commands 

within services apply their own rating criteria inconsistently, according to 

responses to our questionnaire. Finally, the services have different 

maintenance funding goals through 2005 and plan to fund repairs below the 

levels required to keep most facilities at current conditions. Therefore, the 

backlog of repairs, some rated “critical,” will increase. The amount varies 

by service.

We found a number of promising practices in the maintenance area among 

nonmilitary entities, such as (1) using a single system for counting the 

number and type of facilities; (2) having a single, engineering-based system 

for assessing facility conditions, carried out by adequately trained 

personnel; and (3) prioritizing budget allocations based on common 

criteria across all facilities, including physical condition, relevance of 

facilities to the mission, and life-cycle costing and budgeting.

None of the military services has implemented all the promising practices. 

Adoption of these practices is hampered by several barriers, including 

(1) the use of real property maintenance funds for other operations and 

maintenance purposes; (2) differing standards among the services for the 

square footage allotted to the same types of facilities (e.g., the number of 

square feet per administrative worker), making it difficult to control 

maintenance costs; (3) the use of multiple budget accounts to pay for real 

property maintenance, which makes it difficult to determine the total cost 

of maintaining facilities; and (4) incomplete and non-comparable 

maintenance and repair data, and different criteria for prioritizing repairs, 

which prevent meaningful comparison by DOD and the Congress of the 

urgency of the services’ requests for funding repairs.
Page 3 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

Because the services do not have accurate or consistent data, the Congress 

does not know if it is funding maintenance and repairs that will provide the 

best return on its investment. To improve management of military real 

property maintenance, our September 1999 report recommended that the 

Secretary of Defense provide funding for a comprehensive strategic real 

property maintenance plan, and develop a cross-service integrated strategy, 

in close coordination and consultation with the heads of facilities 

infrastructure of each service, to comprehensively address real property 

maintenance issues.

Background Congressional concerns about DOD’s and the services’ management of real 

property maintenance are long-standing, going back to the 1950s. In the 

past decade, these concerns have focused in part on the services’ reported 

repair backlog, which increased 64 percent from 1992 through 1998, despite 

the Congress’ net addition of more than $800 million to the services’ 

maintenance accounts during this period to try to eliminate it. In addition, 

to address maintenance issues comprehensively, the Congress provided 

DOD $50 million in 1992 to pilot test a common facility condition 

assessment system. The system was to use common standards in order to 

provide DOD with a single set of measures by which to compare the 

maintenance needs of all service facilities, and to then allocate resources 

on the basis of those needs. It was tested at 10 military installations from 

July 1994 through April 1995. However, the services rejected the system, 

citing the estimated cost of implementing it. Currently, each service 

independently assesses facility conditions annually and estimates the costs 

of required maintenance repairs. 

DOD Does Not Have a 

Comprehensive 

Maintenance Strategy

DOD does not have a comprehensive management strategy for maintaining 

the services’ real property. The 1999 DOD planning guidance does not 

specify any funding level or goals for the maintenance of property, other 

than stating that the services are to fund maintenance at a level they 

consider adequate to execute missions. In contrast, in 1996, DOD had 

directed the services to provide sufficient funding to reverse the 

deterioration of facilities, and to improve their effectiveness. In 1997, DOD 

somewhat reduced that goal, by calling on the services to fund just threefourths of their individually determined maintenance requirements by 2003. 

However, the 1999 guidance has none of the 1996 or 1997 language. DOD 

told us that this was a retreat from the earlier language, leaving it up to 

individual commanders to decide what is adequate.
Page 4 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

Along these same lines, although DOD had funded development of a 

strategic maintenance plan in its fiscal year 1999 budget, it shifted the 

funding to other priorities in early 1999. 

Services Use Different 

Rating Systems and Apply 

Them Inconsistently

DOD does not have common criteria by which the services are to rate the 

condition of their facilities, prioritize repair needs, or allocate resources. 

Instead, each service has its own criteria for assessing the condition of its 

properties and the urgency of repairs, prioritizing maintenance needs, and 

deciding how much to allocate for maintenance, thus making it difficult for 

DOD or the Congress to prioritize requests for maintenance funding among 

the services. As a result of the differences among the services’ systems, a 

facility rated as “satisfactory” by one service could be rated as 

“unsatisfactory” by another. For example, the Air Force system rates 

urgency of repairs in terms of impact on mission; 73 percent of Air Force 

bases said that mission impact was the most important factor in assigning a 

worst rating. In contrast, the Army’s system rates facility conditions and 

quantity, and only 29 percent of Army bases said mission impact was the 

most important factor in assigning a worst rating to a building. These 

different systems make it difficult for DOD or the Congress to compare the 

urgency of needed repairs among the services.

The services use the following contrasting systems:

• The Army rates facility condition and quantity at three levels, from 

worst (red), to fair (amber), to best (green).

• The Air Force rates facilities’ deficiencies with regard to their estimated 

impact on four mission areas, at three levels (critical, degraded, and 

minimal).

• The Navy uses an engineering-based assessment to determine facilities’ 

deficiencies; data are then used to rate the deficiencies’ impact on 

eight mission areas at four levels, from C1 (has fully met demands) to C4 

(has not met vital demands).

• The Marine Corps uses a system similar to the Navy’s, but uses 26 rather 

than 28 mission areas.

In response to our survey, bases within the same service—and among the 

services—showed varying degrees of consensus in the ways they ranked 

reasons why facilities received a “worst” rating. For example, 29 percent of 

the Army bases reported “conditions severely impede mission” as a most 

important reason for assigning a “worst” rating while 62 percent ranked 

this factor as of moderate importance. Similarly, 39 percent of Air Force 
Page 5 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

bases rated “severe physical deficiency” as a most important factor, while 

58 percent rated it as of “moderate importance.”

In addition, bases lack procedures to ensure that assessments of facility 

conditions are valid and reliable, that is, that they actually reflect the 

facilities’ physical conditions. Fifty-five percent indicated that they had no 

formal standardized procedures to determine the reliability of inspectors’ 

ratings.

Service Funding Plans May 

Lead to Increase in 

Backlogged Repairs

The total reported backlog of needed repairs increased from $8.9 to 

$14.6 billion (64 percent in nominal terms) from 1992 through 1998.2

However, the services rate the urgency of their backlogs differently and, in 

the absence of a single rating system, it is not possible to determine the 

validity of the services’ assessment of the criticality of repairs, or to 

prioritize spending among them.3

 The Air Force has three levels of urgency 

for backlog (critical, degraded, minimal) and defines critical as indicating 

“a significant loss of installation mission capability and frequent mission 

interruptions.” The Navy has two levels of urgency (critical and deferrable), 

reports only the critical amount officially, and defines critical as those 

repairs warranting fixing within 12 months. The Marine Corps reports all 

identified deficiencies as backlog, and does not divide them into categories. 

The Army no longer officially reports a backlog figure—reflecting its own 

doubts about the validity of the estimates. Rather, it calculates how much is 

required to sustain facilities at their existing levels plus the cost of 

renovations.

Further increases in the services’ backlogs are projected to occur, given the 

services’ plans to fund maintenance and repair below identified needs over 

the next several years, as follows:

• The Air Force plans to spend no money at all on repair projects until 

fiscal year 2003 (while providing an amount equal to 1 percent of total 

facility replacement value at each base for what it terms preventive 

2

A contributing cause may be, as we reported in 1997, that total real property maintenance 

spending decreased 38 percent during fiscal years 1987-96, while the services reduced the 

square footage they maintained only about 10 percent during the same period.

3

The Air Force reported a total of $7.4 billion in needed repairs for fiscal year 1998, of which 

$355 million was rated critical. The Navy reported a total of $6.1 billion in backlog, of which 

$2.87 billion was rated critical. 
Page 6 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

maintenance, such as painting, and for emergency minor repairs). 

Although repair spending resumes in 2003, the Air Force estimates that 

under this plan only 40 percent of critical or degraded repairs will be 

addressed by 2005.

• The Navy reported that its critical backlog will increase about 

10 percent (from about $2.5 billion to about $2.75 billion in fiscal year 

2003) under its current funding plan. The Navy’s plan will nearly 

eliminate the critical backlog in barracks but will reduce it less in some 

others, such as administrative offices and storage. The plan provides no 

funding to address the non-critical backlog.

• The Marine Corps estimates that from fiscal year 1999 through fiscal 

year 2005, its backlog will increase 60 percent in dollar value.

• The Army plans to increase maintenance spending from 64 percent of its 

minimum annual sustainment requirement to about 84 percent of the 

requirement by 2005. However, this latter goal was reduced from 

91 percent in early 1999, and neither spending level provides enough to 

maintain all facilities at existing conditions.

The services’ future maintenance spending plans reflect the services’ longstanding practice of funding maintenance at levels below identified 

requirements. The major commands do not request the amount actually 

needed to accomplish required maintenance and repairs because they 

believe that their headquarters will not fund maintenance at that level. We 

found little relationship between the services’ identified maintenance and 

repair needs and the funds requested to address those needs. Bases 

reported to us on the survey we sent them that they received 16.2 percent 

of known maintenance needs from their commands in fiscal year 1997 

($3.8 billion of $23.5 billion). Army bases reported that they received 

funding equal to 15.4 percent of their needs; Air Force bases received 

18.3 percent; Navy bases, 14.2 percent; and Marine Corps, 28 percent.

According to headquarters facility management officials of each service, 

funding maintenance is not their service’s first priority. The major 

commands and bases understand this and have acted accordingly—as 

reflected in the data reported to us by the commands and the bases. For 

example, base officials said that in their view service headquarters do not 

adequately consider maintenance and repair needs identified during the 

assessment process in making decisions about budget and allocation of 

resources. In light of the lack of connection between the assessments, 

requests, and actual subsequent funding allocations, some base officials 

questioned the wisdom of expending resources on annual assessments of 

maintenance and repair needs.
Page 7 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

Although each service funds maintenance at levels well below estimated 

needs, the lack of consistency in rating repair needs across and within the 

services makes it difficult to determine how urgent these needs truly are. 

Therefore, simply providing additional funding will not ensure that the 

most important deficiencies are funded first, or that buildings with repair 

needs exceeding a large percentage of their replacement value should not 

be demolished instead (saving money in the long run). In the absence of a 

common rating system, neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor 

the services can meaningfully prioritize the services’ maintenance and 

repair funding requests. Nor can they be assured that if more funds were 

provided that they would be targeted to those facilities that are both 

needed to carry out critical missions and in greatest need of repair. 

Promising Practices in 

Facilities Management

In interviews with non-military entities and maintenance experts, we were 

told of a number of promising practices in the repair and maintenance area, 

including

• using a single system for counting the number and type of facilities;

• having a single, engineering-based system for assessing facility 

conditions by adequately trained personnel;

• prioritizing budget allocations based on physical condition, relevance of 

facilities to the mission, and life-cycle costing and budgeting;4

• using a single property maintenance budget that is controlled by a 

central office with the power to shift resources to facilities in the 

greatest need;

• creating incentives to demolish or vacate excess space; 

• restricting the use of maintenance funds to maintenance purposes; and

• allowing maintenance management offices to charge tenant entities an 

annual maintenance fee, based on square feet used, to ensure adequate 

funding for facilities and to create an incentive for space conservation.

Two nonmilitary organizations—the Capital Needs Analysis Center of the 

Church of Latter-day Saints at Brigham Young University and Lawrence 

Livermore National Laboratory—have facility management systems that 

collectively use all of these practices. Both report these practices enable 

4

Life-cycle facility management is a methodology aimed at maximizing cost-effectiveness. 

As described by the National Research Council, building “service life can be optimized 

through adequate and timely maintenance and repairs.” National Research Council, 

Stewardship of Federal Facilities (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, Oct. 1998), 

p. 12.
Page 8 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

them to: maintain needed facilities at agreed upon standard levels; stabilize 

repair backlogs (but requiring supplemental funding to fix existing 

backlog); and accurately predict future maintenance needs, satisfy 

customers that maintenance funds are allocated fairly and based on actual 

need, and prepare credible budget requests. Similarly, a military 

organization—the U.S. Army Health Facility Planning Agency—is 

implementing a life-cycle investment strategy that it expects to reduce 

major repair costs by 50 percent and cut programming time from years to 

months.

Obstacles to Effective 

Implementation by the 

Services of Promising 

Practices

None of the military services have implemented all the promising practices 

identified to us by the non-military organizations. Adoption of these 

practices is hampered by several barriers. First, DOD lacks basic data that 

would permit it to compare how much the services spend per square foot 

on barracks or other common buildings, such as administrative offices, 

classrooms, and warehouses. While the Army annually collects per square 

foot spending data for more than 100 types of structures, we did not find 

comparable data collected by the other services.

Second, repair and maintenance funds are frequently used for other 

purposes, such as unfunded emergency military overseas operations, 

reducing the amount available for maintenance, as well as creating 

budgeting and contracting instability. Third, multiple accounts are used to 

pay for maintenance and repair; the Army pays for maintenance from 

27 different accounts; and the Center for Naval Analyses found that the 

Navy had 110 different accounts for maintenance use in 1995. As a result of 

these multiple accounts, funding for real property maintenance is 

fragmented, creating problems in determining how much is actually being 

spent.

Fourth, the services have different coding schemes to record the number 

and type of their facilities; as a result, this information is not comparable 

across the services. Without valid, reliable data, DOD and the services 

cannot adequately evaluate the cost-effectiveness of real property 

management or even know how much is being spent on maintenance and 

repair.

Fifth, there are no per square foot space standards among the services to 

determine whether a service is using much more space per worker than 

other services for similar functions. Common standards are useful in 

managing space utilization and controlling costs, since less space use 
Page 9 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

reduces maintenance needs. For example, the Army allocates 162 square 

feet per administrative worker; the Navy and the Marines allocate 110 to 

150 square feet, depending on grade level. Although some facilities will 

always be service-unique (e.g., nuclear submarine repair facilities; 

intercontinental ballistic missile silos), many (such as barracks, standard 

classrooms, administrative space, and family housing) are common across 

the services. The Army uses its standards to determine whether more space 

than required per worker is being used at bases, to help set maintenance 

budgets.

In addition, we found the services management of repair and maintenance 

to be hindered by

• legal and administrative restrictions of the National Historic 

Preservation Act and the McKinney Act5

 that, while having distinct 

purposes, may hamper the services’ ability to cost-effectively address 

maintenance issues and

• insufficient training of personnel involved in assessing facility 

conditions, potentially resulting in inconsistent and unreliable 

determinations of repair requirements.

Recommendations On the basis of our review, we recommended in our September 1999 report 

that the Secretary of Defense improve DOD’s management of repair and 

maintenance activities. Specifically, we recommended that DOD fund 

development of a DOD strategic maintenance plan, as had been originally 

provided in 1999. We also recommended that DOD develop a cross-service 

integrated strategy, in close coordination and consultation with the heads 

of facilities of each service, to comprehensively address repair and 

maintenance issues. The strategy should provide, at a minimum, for 

• uniform standards that set the minimum condition in which military 

facilities are to be maintained and standardized condition assessment 

criteria; 

5

The National Historic Preservation Act (16 U.S.C. §470h-2) governs the preservation of 

historic buildings and can prevent the services from demolishing a historic building. The 

McKinney Act (16 U.S.C. §1141) requires DOD to work with the Department of Housing and 

Urban Development to determine whether unused or underused facilities scheduled to be 

demolished are suitable for use by the homeless. 
Page 10 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

• standard criteria by which the services are to allocate space for different 

types of facilities (e.g., barracks, classrooms, administrative buildings) 

and against which maintenance funding allocations will be measured; 

• standard criteria for counting the number and type of facilities;

• computerized, on-line inventory and cost databases that permit 

meaningful comparisons, across and within the services, of repair and 

maintenance spending by type, size, and location of facility and repair 

and maintenance activity, including direct data access by DOD 

headquarters;

• standard cost accounting methods by which the services will record and 

track their maintenance expenditures so that they and DOD know how 

much is being spent, where it is being spent, and on what type of facility 

or repair activity it is being spent on, by common metric; 

• the identification of priorities for the services to use to explicitly link 

needs assessments with resource allocations and tracking systems that 

show whether or not identified high priority needs are allocated the 

funds intended for them by the Congress;

• mandated training standards (curriculum and hours) for all those 

involved in condition assessment and ratings of repair urgency; and

• a comprehensive, valid, engineering-based assessment system that 

incorporates life-cycle planning into facilities maintenance based on the 

well-developed methods already used by nonmilitary entities.

In addition, we noted that the Department’s repair and maintenance 

strategy needs to deal with the issue of funding instability, particularly the 

migration of maintenance funds to non-maintenance uses. In this regard, 

we suggested that the Department consider the feasibility of adopting the 

promising practices used by some non-military organizations. To the extent 

that adoption of any of these practices would require changes to existing 

law, we recommended that the Department develop a legislative proposal 

for submission to the Congress.

DOD stated that overall, our report provides a good review of the 

Department’s real property maintenance program. DOD agreed with most 

of our recommendations but stated we did not give adequate credit to the 

services for their work in better defining real property maintenance 

requirements and allocating funding. DOD disagreed with the need to 

establish standard cost accounting methods because it would impose too 

great a level of detail and to develop mandated training standards for 

personnel involved in real property maintenance assessments because 

DOD is not certain such training is needed. Finally, DOD disagreed with our 

recommendation to restrict the use of maintenance funds to maintenance 
Page 11 GAO/T-NSIAD-00-51

purposes, stating that it would excessively curtail the flexibility of 

commanders. We continue to believe these measures are needed to provide 

DOD with adequate oversight and consistency in identifying and 

prioritizing real property maintenance and repairs, as well as to assure that 

funds allocated for maintenance are used as intended by the Congress.

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my statement. I will be happy to answer any 

questions you may have.

Contacts and Acknowledgments For future contacts regarding this testimony, please contact Kwai-Cheung 

Chan at (202) 512-3092. Individuals making key contributions to this 

testimony included Dr. Jonathan R. Tumin and Dr. Sushil K. Sharma.

(713050) Letr
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