DEFENSE WEATHER 

SATELLITES

DOD Faces 

Acquisition 

Challenges for 

Addressing Capability 

Needs

Statement of Cristina T. Chaplain, Director, Acquisition 

and Sourcing Management

Testimony 

Before the Subcommittee on 

Environment, Committee on Science, 

Space, and Technology, House of 

Representatives

For Release on Delivery 

Expected at 10 a.m. ET

Thursday, July 7, 2016

GAO-16-769T

United States Government Accountability Office
United States Government Accountability Office

Highlights of GAO-16-769T, a testimony 

before the Subcommittee on Environment, 

Committee on Science, Space, and 

Technology, House of Representatives

July 2016

DEFENSE WEATHER SATELLITES

DOD Faces Acquisition Challenges for 

Addressing Capability Needs

What GAO Found

GAO found in March 2016 that the Department of Defense (DOD), in conducting 

a requirements review and Analysis of Alternatives (AOA) from 2012 to 2014,

generally performed a thorough review for identifying capability gaps in 

meteorological and oceanographic data—also referred to as weather data—that 

needed to be met and determining the operational benefit of satisfying these 

gaps. 

In doing so, the AOA determined that some capabilities with military utility could 

be covered by other assets or addressed with modeling development. The AOA 

also offered analysis that was useful for informing plans for a space-based 

solution for three capabilities facing near-term needs: ocean surface vector wind, 

tropical cyclone intensity, and energetic charged particles. GAO found that DOD 

was developing plans based on this analysis for a Weather System Follow-on

program to address these areas. 

The AOA was less useful for informing plans for two of the highest-priority 

capabilities—cloud characterization and theater weather imagery data—now 

facing near-term gaps over the Indian Ocean. While DOD consulted with a wide 

range of stakeholders in conducting the AOA, it did not effectively collaborate 

with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which, on a 

case-by-case basis represents DOD’s interests with international partners. 

Specifically, NOAA was not involved in reviews of the AOA or regular 

discussions with AOA study leadership. The lack of formal coordination and 

collaboration with NOAA, such as employing a mechanism that identified roles 

and responsibilities for the two agencies during the AOA, contributed to an 

incorrect assumption about the continued availability of critical weather data from 

European satellites. As a result, the AOA did not fully assess solutions for these 

high priority capabilities. 

GAO reported that DOD was exploring options outside of the AOA process for 

mitigating these pending capability gaps, including continued or increased 

reliance on data provided by international partners.

View GAO-16-769T. For more information, 

contact Cristina Chaplain at (202) 512-4841 or 

chaplainc@gao.gov. 

Why GAO Did This Study

Weather data are instrumental for 

planning, executing, and sustaining 

U.S. military operations and for 

meeting civilian needs, such as 

weather forecasting and climate 

research. As existing weather 

satellite systems age, DOD faces 

potential gaps in its space-based 

weather monitoring capabilities. As a 

result, DOD and other stakeholders, 

including the military services, the 

intelligence community, and U.S. civil 

agencies such as NOAA, are now in 

a precarious position to fill key 

capability gaps with immediate and 

near-term solutions. DOD conducted 

an AOA to identify and compare the 

operational effectiveness and life 

cycle costs of potential solutions. 

This testimony is based on a report 

GAO issued in March 2016 on its 

assessment of DOD’s AOA and 

focuses on the extent to which it 

informed DOD’s plans for providing 

weather-related capabilities and 

addressed input from stakeholders. 

GAO reviewed DOD’s AOA 

documents and interviewed DOD 

officials, including stakeholders

within the military services, and 

NOAA officials.

What GAO Recommends

In the March 2016 report, GAO 

recommended that DOD establish 

formal mechanisms for coordination 

with NOAA, among other things, and 

DOD concurred.
Letter

Page 1 GAO-16-769T 

Chairman Bridenstine, Ranking Member Bonamici and Members of the 

Subcommittee:

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the Department of Defense’s 

(DOD) efforts to sustain and improve its space-based weather monitoring 

capabilities. Meteorological and oceanographic data—also referred to as 

weather data—are key to providing information for the successful 

planning, execution, and sustainment of U.S. military operations and for 

civilian uses, such as weather forecasting and climate research. As 

DOD’s primary existing weather satellite system—the Defense 

Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP)—ages and other satellites near 

their estimated end of life, DOD faces potential gaps in its space-based 

weather monitoring capabilities which may affect stakeholders that use 

them, including the military services, the intelligence community, and U.S. 

civil agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric 

Administration (NOAA). Today, I will provide background on DOD efforts 

to replenish its weather satellites and a brief overview of our recent 

review of the analysis DOD conducted to assess options for future 

weather satellites.

DOD has been challenged to replenish its weather satellites. After two 

unsuccessful attempts to develop follow-on programs from 1997 through 

fiscal year 2012, DOD and other stakeholders who rely on weather 

monitoring data are now in a precarious position in which key capabilities 

require immediate and near-term solutions. From February 2012 through 

September 2014, DOD conducted a requirements review and its SpaceBased Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) Analysis of Alternatives (AOA) 

to identify and compare the operational effectiveness and life cycle costs 

of potential solutions for providing SBEM capabilities. An AOA—a key 

analysis in DOD’s acquisition process—is intended to inform a decision 

on the most cost effective solution for meeting validated capability 

requirements and identify a wide range of solutions with a reasonable 

likelihood of providing the needed capabilities.

My statement is based on a report we issued earlier in March 2016 on our 

assessment of DOD’s SBEM AOA and focuses on the extent to which the 

SBEM AOA addressed input from stakeholders and informed DOD’s 

Letter
Page 2 GAO-16-769T 

plans for providing SBEM capabilities.1 For that report, we reviewed 

relevant DOD and GAO documents to develop an understanding of the 

requirements and guidance for conducting an AOA and reviewed the 

AOA documents and interviewed DOD officials involved in conducting 

and reviewing the AOA to understand how it was developed. We also 

interviewed users and providers of DOD SBEM data (stakeholders), such 

as military service, intelligence community, and NOAA officials, to gain 

their perspectives on how stakeholder views were incorporated into the 

AOA. Additionally, we interviewed industry officials about ways to 

effectively assess options for providing SBEM capabilities, reviewed 

documents, and interviewed DOD officials about plans and decision 

making processes for providing future SBEM capabilities. We also 

interviewed NOAA officials about activities of the international SBEM 

community to understand potential effects on DOD’s plans. Our work was 

performed in accordance with generally accepted government auditing 

standards.

Since the 1960s, the United States has operated meteorological polarorbiting satellite systems that provide global high-resolution 

observations—such as cloud cover, winds, precipitation, atmospheric 

temperature, and sea ice conditions—ideal for tactical weather support 

and long-range numerical weather prediction. DOD with its DMSP 

satellites, and NOAA with its Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental 

Satellite (POES) and Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite 

(the first in the Joint Polar Satellite System), rely on each other’s satellite 

systems to provide the data to meet their respective needs.2 NOAA 

established the JPSS program in 2010 to replace aging polar satellites 

and provide critical environmental data used in forecasting the weather. 

NOAA, with assistance from the National Aeronautics and Space 

 1

GAO, Defense Weather Satellites: Analysis of Alternatives Is Useful for Certain 

Capabilities, but Ineffective Coordination Limited Assessment of Two Critical Capabilities, 

GAO-16-252R (Washington, D.C.: March 10, 2016).

2

Polar-orbiting satellites in low Earth orbit constantly circle the earth in an almost northsouth orbit over the poles. Each successive orbital pass occurs at the same local time of 

day, such as early morning, mid-morning, and afternoon. DOD’s DMSP satellites cross the 

equator in the early and mid-morning orbits and NOAA’s satellites cross the equator in the 

afternoon orbit. The United States also relies on a European satellite, the Meteorological 

Operational satellite, currently crossing the equator in the mid-morning orbit.

Background
Page 3 GAO-16-769T 

Administration (NASA), has developed the Joint Polar Satellite System to 

meet the responsibility for coverage in the afternoon orbit. DOD has been 

involved with two previous efforts to develop a replacement for DMSP, 

both of which were cancelled:

• National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System 

(NPOESS)—Tri-agency program between DOD, NOAA, and NASA to 

replace both DMSP and POES; started in 1997 and cancelled in 2010 

due to escalating costs and schedule delays.

• Defense Weather Satellite System—DOD program intended to 

continue providing weather observations from the morning orbit 

following NPOESS cancellation; started in 2010 and cancelled in 

fiscal year 2012 because the program was considered early-to-need 

with unsustainable costs.3

Figure 1 below illustrates the timeline for the past DOD weather satellite 

acquisitions along with the timeline for NOAA’s weather satellite 

development.

 3

In May 1994, a Presidential Decision Directive required DOD and the Department of 

Commerce through NOAA to converge their two separate weather satellite programs into 

a single program capable of satisfying both military and civilian requirements. Presidential 

Decision Directive NSTC-2, Convergence of U.S. Polar-Orbiting Operational 

Environmental Satellite Systems (May 5, 1994). DOD was responsible for the NPOESS 

acquisition, NOAA was responsible for overall program management and satellite 

operations, and NASA was responsible for facilitating the development and incorporation 

of new technologies. After NPOESS was cancelled in 2010, DOD was given responsibility 

for covering the early morning polar orbit and started a separate program, the Defense 

Weather Satellite System. 
Page 4 GAO-16-769T 

Figure 1: Time Line of Efforts to Replace DMSP

The challenges DOD has faced with replenishing its current weather 

satellite system, especially considering those encountered under the 

NPOESS program, are not surprising. Our prior work has found that DOD 

and civil government space programs have long been characterized by 

large cost overruns and schedule delays.4 The types of management and 

oversight problems we commonly found include: optimistic cost 

estimating, funding gaps, lax oversight, poor contractor performance, 

parts quality problems, and frequent program manager turnover. Our 

reviews in recent years have made a number of recommendations aimed 

at putting DOD on a better footing as it considers and implements 

 4

GAO, Space Acquisitions: Challenges Facing DOD as it Changes Approaches to Space 

Acquisitions, GAO-16-471T (Washington, D.C.: Mar. 9, 2016); GAO, Space Acquisitions: 

Some Programs Have Overcome Past Problems, but Challenges and Uncertainty Remain 

for the Future, GAO-15-492T (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 29, 2015); GAO, Polar-Orbiting 

Satellites: With Costs Increasing and Data Continuity at Risk, Improvements Needed in 

Tri-agency Decision Making, GAO-09-772T (Washington, D.C.: June 17, 2009).
Page 5 GAO-16-769T 

significant changes for space programs. For example, we recommended 

that when planning for the next phase of competition for launches, the Air 

Force use an incremental approach to the next acquisition strategy to 

ensure that it does not commit itself to a strategy until data is available to 

make an informed decision, and DOD concurred.5

Our prior work has shown that DOD satellites have also tended to be 

monolithic—attempting to satisfy the needs of many and to get the most 

capability out of a satellite as possible in light of the high cost of launching 

them. While this approach met the needs of multiple missions, it further 

complicated satellite design. Our work on the NPOESS program has 

shown that without clear lines of authority, conflicts between satellite 

users hampered decisions, such as for requirements. Cost and schedule 

growth in DOD’s space programs was sometimes driven by inherent 

technical, design, and engineering risks, but more often than not, our 

reports found that management and oversight problems were behind cost 

and schedule growth. Consequently, as DOD moves forward with its 

efforts to replenish its weather satellites, careful consideration of ways to 

address or avoid these longstanding challenges may help to deliver 

needed capabilities within cost and schedule goals.

Our March 2016 report found that DOD made an effort to plan for future 

capabilities with a more cost-effective approach in mind, including 

consideration of which capabilities DOD needed to provide and which 

could be provided by leveraging other sources of data. Specifically, we 

found that DOD generally conducted a thorough review for identifying 

capability gaps that needed to be met and determining the operational 

benefit of satisfying these gaps. In doing so, the study determined that 

some gaps could be better addressed by non-space-based solutions or 

improvements to modeling. We also found that the AOA offered analysis 

that was useful for informing plans for a space-based solution for three 

capabilities with near-term needs—ocean surface vector wind, tropical 

cyclone intensity, and energetic charged particles—and that other 

capabilities with military utility could be covered by other assets or 

addressed with modeling development. In March 2016 we reported that 

DOD is developing plans based on this analysis for a Weather System 

 5

GAO-16-471T.

DOD’s SBEM Analysis of 

Alternatives Is Useful for 

Certain Capabilities, but 

Ineffective Coordination 

Limited Assessment of 

Two Critical Capabilities
Page 6 GAO-16-769T 

Follow-on program to provide ocean surface vector wind and tropical 

cyclone intensity capabilities, though it may not be available in time to 

avoid short term gaps. For the third capability, energetic charged 

particles, the Air Force has developed a plan to collect data by hosting 

sensors on all of its satellites.

However, we found that the AOA was less useful for informing plans for 

the two highest-priority capabilities—cloud characterization and theater 

weather imagery data—now facing near-term gaps over the Indian 

Ocean, because it did not fully assess solutions to provide these 

capabilities. While DOD consulted with a wide range of DOD stakeholders 

in conducting the AOA, it did not effectively collaborate with NOAA (on a 

case-by-case basis, NOAA represents DOD’s interests with international 

partners regarding SBEM data). Specifically, NOAA was not involved in 

reviews of the AOA or regular discussions with AOA study leadership.6

The lack of formal coordination and collaboration with NOAA, such as 

employing a mechanism that identified roles and responsibilities for the 

two agencies during the AOA, contributed to an incorrect assumption 

about the continued availability of critical data from European satellites. 

Specifically, the AOA study determined that the likelihood the gap would 

not be filled was low, based on historical trends, and as a result DOD did 

not fully assess solutions for cloud characterization and theater weather 

imagery data. However, NOAA officials who work closely with 

international partners had an understanding of the plans for European 

satellites at the time, and during the AOA study period, publicly available 

reports from an international coordination group indicated uncertainty 

about extended European coverage over the Indian Ocean.

7 We found in 

March 2016 that because of a potential near-term gap for these 

capabilities, DOD is exploring options outside of the AOA process for 

 6

While several NOAA officials were assigned to one of the AOA working groups, 

according to one NOAA participant, the interaction entailed receiving emails rather than 

participating in meetings or regular dialogue throughout the AOA.

7

These reports were published by the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites, 

which has a range of international member organizations, including NOAA and the 

European agency responsible for the Meteosat system, EUMETSAT. Coordination Group 

for Meteorological Satellites, Report of the 41st Meeting of the Coordination Group for 

Meteorological Satellites; (Tsukuba, Japan: July 8-12, 2013); EUMETSAT’s Plans for 

Indian Ocean Coverage Beyond 2013 CGMS-41 EUM-WP-15 v1a (July 2, 2013) ; and 

Report of the 40th Meeting of the Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites 

(Lugano, Switzerland: Nov. 5-8, 2012).
Page 7 GAO-16-769T 

mitigating these gaps, including continued or increased reliance on data 

provided by international partners.

Ideally, DOD could have conducted an SBEM AOA when pursuing new 

acquisitions in the aftermath of the NPOESS cancellation. But because 

the analysis was conducted 2 years later, the AOA team faced pressures 

to complete the study in time to inform decision making for near term 

needs. However, DOD’s effort to analyze options in the SBEM AOA, 

including consideration of ways to leverage other sources of data, was a 

positive step toward a more cost-effective approach to providing SBEM 

capabilities. As a result of the AOA’s limitations, though, as well as 

cancellations of prior efforts to develop a follow-on system to DMSP, 

DOD is faced with having to quickly initiate efforts to assess potential 

solutions for near-term capability gaps that were not fully assessed in the 

AOA.

Because decisions about whether to provide DOD solutions for SBEM 

capabilities are dependent on the availability of data from U.S. civil 

government and international partner satellites, sufficient and reliable 

information to determine the level of risk DOD is willing to take is crucial. 

Formalizing coordination and collaboration to identify roles and 

responsibilities in planning for SBEM capabilities could offer DOD and 

NOAA the opportunity to help ensure effective communication about the 

availability and reliability of data from U.S. civil government and 

international partner satellites and better inform decision making in the 

future. Consequently, to help ensure DOD is sufficiently informed about 

the availability and reliability of data from U.S. civil government and 

international partner satellites as it plans for future SBEM capabilities that 

rely on such satellites, in our 2016 report we recommended that the 

Secretary of Defense ensure the leads of future SBEM planning efforts 

establish formal mechanisms for coordination and collaboration with 

NOAA that specify roles and responsibilities and ensure accountability for 

both agencies. DOD concurred with our recommendation. In March 2016, 

we reported that DOD and NOAA officials stated that since the conclusion 

of the AOA study period, DOD and NOAA have increased their 

communication by discussing ways to leverage international partner 

satellite data and the possibility of establishing and employing formal 

coordination and collaboration arrangements.

These are encouraging actions, but it is too early to tell whether they will 

be effective or sustainable. We reported in 2012 that past studies and 

reviews examining the leadership, organization, and management of 

national security space have found that there is no single authority 
Page 8 GAO-16-769T 

responsible below the President for integrating space programs, and 

responsibilities for acquiring space systems are diffused across various 

DOD organizations as well as the intelligence community and civil 

agencies such as NASA and NOAA, who rely on these systems.8 This 

fragmentation is problematic not only because of a lack of coordination 

that has led to delays in fielding systems, but also because no one person 

or organization is held accountable for balancing government-wide needs 

against wants, resolving conflicts and ensuring coordination among the 

many organizations involved with space acquisitions, and ensuring that 

resources are directed where they are most needed.

Recent events have further heightened DOD’s challenge in addressing 

gaps in weather monitoring data. Because of a lack of funding, in 

December 2015, the Air Force moved to terminate activities to integrate 

and launch the last DMSP satellite.9 Additionally, in February of this year, 

the latest DMSP satellite to be placed in orbit unexpectedly failed. These 

events have increased the risk of some capability gaps occurring even 

sooner. With potential gaps starting as early as this year, it is important 

for DOD to make decisions in a timely manner, but based on informed 

analysis that considers stakeholder input.

Chairman Bridenstine, Ranking Member Bonamici and Members of the 

Subcommittee, this concludes my statement. I would be pleased to 

respond to any questions you or other Members of the Subcommittee

may have.

 8

GAO, 2012 Annual Report: Opportunities to Reduce Duplication, Overlap and 

Fragmentation, Achieve Savings, and Enhance Revenue, GAO-12-342SP (Washington, 

D.C.: February 28, 2012).

9

DMSP-20 is in “safe keeping” at Lockheed Martin’s satellite facility in Sunnyvale, 

California, where it receives minimal pre-launch preparation and requires less testing than 

traditional mission-ready storage. The Pentagon has pushed back a deadline to begin 

dismantling Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 20 until Sept. 1, 2016.
Page 9 GAO-16-769T 

For further information on this testimony, please contact Cristina Chaplain 

at (202) 512-4841 or chaplainc@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices 

of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last 

page of this statement. Individuals making key contributions to this 

testimony include Emily Bond, Erin Cohen, Brenna Derritt, Juli Digate, 

Marie Ahearn, Michael Kaeser, Jay Tallon, Oziel Trevino, and Rich 

Horiuchi (Assistant Director).

GAO Contact and 

Staff 

Acknowledgments

(100956)
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