DOD has an extensive organizational structure for managing and overseeing conventional ammunition, with the Army having a prominent role. Since 1975, the Secretary of the Army has served as DOD’s Single Manager for Conventional Ammunition (hereafter referred to as the Single Manager). Under DOD guidance, the Single Manager’s mission encompasses all aspects of the life cycle of conventional ammunition, from research and development through acquisition, inventory management, and eventual disposal. The Single Manager, the military services, and U.S. Special Operations Command all have responsibilities pertaining to assigned conventional ammunition items, including logistics management, stock control, and reporting on the status of inventory. In addition, DOD organizations involved in ammunition management have developed joint policies and procedures to guide certain activities. The Secretary of the Army, in executing the Single Manager role, has delegated and designated related functions to a number of Army entities. For example, responsibility for issuing policy and providing oversight of the Single Manager mission is delegated to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology. The Deputy Commanding General of Army Materiel Command serves as the Executive Director for Conventional Ammunition, responsible for monitoring and assessing the overall Single Manager mission and for overseeing the Single Manager’s execution of its mission for joint service activities. Joint Munitions Command, a subordinate command of Army Materiel Command, is assigned as the field operating activity for the Single Manager, responsible for providing logistics and sustainment support, storing and managing wholesale ammunition for all of the military services, and providing information to the military services on ammunition stored at Army depots. In this role, the Joint Munitions Command maintains items, performs physical inventory checks, and reports on the status of assets that are stored at its eight depots across the United States. Aviation and Missile Command provides similar functions for tactical missiles that are stored at these sites. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics has responsibility to provide policy and guidance for the Single Manager’s mission and, in collaboration with other DOD component heads, appraise the overall performance of the Single Manager in accomplishing the mission objectives outlined in guidance and facilitate improvements.offices. All of the military services have automated information systems for managing and maintaining accountability for ammunition inventory. The Air Force has developed the Combat Ammunition System, which contains comprehensive information on ammunition at all levels—depot, ammunition supply points in theaters of operations, and individual units. The Navy uses its Ordnance Information System, which is divided into two sub-systems for wholesale and retail stocks. The Marine Corps has developed the Ordnance Information System–Marine Corps, which shares a common system architecture with the Navy’s system. The Army has LMP as well as other systems—such as the Worldwide Ammunition Reporting System–New Technology—which contain comprehensive information about wholesale and Army retail ammunition stocks. LMP, among other functions, stores information on wholesale inventory in all classes of supply, including ammunition. LMP contains information on all ammunition inventory stored at Army depots, including inventory that the Army manages for other services. The Army completed final deployment of initial LMP capabilities, referred to as Increment 1, in 2010. In December 2011, the Army began to develop additional capabilities for LMP—referred to as LMP Increment 2. The Army plans to deploy Increment 2 in multiple stages between December 2013 and September 2016. DOD has worked for decades to achieve department-wide visibility of ammunition stocks in a single database. Drawing upon lessons learned from the Gulf War in 1990-91, it sought to develop a Joint Total Asset Visibility system to provide logistics information on all classes of supply. For ammunition, it aimed to integrate multiple service databases to provide a department-wide ammunition capability. DOD also initiated a program to develop a Joint Ammunition Management Standard System. When that program was terminated because it did not provide a single, viable department-wide source of ammunition data, the Army then agreed to support the sustainment of the ammunition portion of the joint asset visibility database, known as the National Level Ammunition Capability, or NLAC. In fiscal year 2012, NLAC’s budget was about $2.4 million. NLAC receives data from a variety of sources, serving as a DOD-wide data repository, and in turn provides data to DOD decision support systems (see fig. 1). As shown in the figure, NLAC receives data from the services’ ammunition systems and other sources. It provides data to two DOD decision support systems—the Defense Readiness Reporting System and the Global Combat Support System-Joint, both of which are used by operational planners. Testing is underway with interfaces between NLAC and the Joint Operation Planning and Execution System and the Global Command and Control System-Joint. In its guidance, DOD has indicated a need for systems to provide logistics information visibility to support the joint warfighter. DOD guidance directs the military services to stratify their conventional munitions inventory into several categories and prepare annual ammunition reports. The stratification separates the inventory into several categories to assess the ability of the inventory to meet stated requirements, ensure that inventories above requirements are kept only if warranted, and optimize the department’s ammunition inventory. The categories are requirement-related munitions stock, including items needed for war reserve, training, and testing; contingency retention munitions stock, which includes items that support requirements other than those already considered in the war reserve requirement and the training and testing requirements; economic retention munitions stock, a category that refers to inventory that is more expensive to dispose of and reacquire in the future than to retain to meet future requirements; and potential reutilization and disposal stocks, meaning inventory that exceeds the total of the other categories. In fiscal year 2013, the Army listed about 3.8 billion ammunition items on its annual report; the Marine Corps listed about 1.5 billion, and the Air Force listed about 730 million. The services prepare their annual stratification reports prior to an annual conference called the Quad Services Cross-Leveling Review. The purpose of the conference is to identify ammunition that is excess to one service’s needs (i.e., stock identified for potential reutilization or disposal) and can be transferred to another service that has identified a requirement for that same item.Defense Security Cooperation Agency screens any inventory that is not redistributed at this annual meeting for suitability for foreign military sales. According to a 2010 Army Audit Agency report, the Army had significantly underestimated the funding requirements needed to perform its conventional ammunition demilitarization mission and, as a result, the The stockpile has grown to over 557,000 tons, representing a $1 billion liability. GAO last reported on DOD’s conventional ammunition management in 1999.conventional ammunition program continued to be fragmented despite internal recognition of the problem and efforts to identify alternative solutions. We recommended that the Secretary of Defense direct the Secretary of the Army to establish a timeframe for implementing an Army- wide reorganization to integrate the management of conventional ammunition. DOD concurred, commenting that although the Army was working to resolve the inefficiencies we noted and to make the necessary organizational changes, the conventional ammunition program continued to be fragmented. DOD agreed that the three commands then dealing with various aspects of conventional ammunition needed to implement an Army-wide organizational restructuring to integrate the management of conventional ammunition. DOD subsequently took actions to implement GAO’s recommendation. The military services’ ammunition systems cannot directly exchange data because they use different data exchange formats. Only the Army’s LMP system uses the standard DOD format; the Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force systems operate with formats that are obsolete and not compatible with the format used by LMP. In December 2003, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics issued a memo to the military services and other components establishing policy for migration of logistics systems to the Defense Logistics Management Standards (DLMS) and elimination of the use of the Military Standard Systems (MILS). MILS is based on standards and computer technology developed more than 50 years ago. According to DOD, MILS is functionally constraining, technologically obsolete, and unable to support the tracking of an item throughout its life cycle and across the entire supply chain using unique identifier codes. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics reaffirmed this direction in 2013, calling for compliance by 2019. In addition, DOD guidance indicates that DLMS, rather than MILS, shall be the basis for new, replacement, and major modifications to logistics business processes or systems. LMP uses DLMS for data exchange; however, the other services’ ammunition systems continue to exchange data using MILS. Consequently, LMP cannot exchange data directly with the other services’ ammunition systems. Rather, data must pass through a translation process at Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Transaction Services. DLA’s process translates data from one format to another format, enabling otherwise incompatible systems to exchange data. With respect to the services’ ammunition systems, the translation process occurs for the exchange of ammunition data between LMP and Navy’s and the Marine Corps’ ammunition systems; however, according to Air Force Combat Ammunition System officials, the translation of data between LMP and the Air Force’s system is not complete. Air Force Combat Ammunition System officials we interviewed stated that the ammunition data the Air Force system receives from LMP that DLA Transaction Services translates does not include lot and serial number information. Figure 2 provides a high-level overview of how data flow between service ammunition systems using the translation process. The DLA Logistics Management Standards Office has recommended the services and other DOD components make DLMS implementation a top priority in order to achieve efficiencies consistent with the direction from the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.