The Department of Defense understands that a comprehensive transformation of its logistics structures, processes, and supporting information systems is necessary to improve its customer services and reduce the cost of support. To lead this transformation, the Department established the Logistics Reform Senior Steering Group—comprised of senior officials from the Joint Staff, the military services, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. Transportation Command—to develop its Fiscal Year 2000 Logistics Strategic Plan. This plan was designed during a series of workshops that focused the collective attention and resources that the Department believed were necessary for achieving its key objectives. This top-leadership effort concentrated on developing a common mission, vision, and associated performance goals. To meet the Department of Defense goal to have a successful logistics transformation, the Logistics Reform Senior Steering Group prescribed the following specific “success criteria.” Optimize cycle times—acquisition, supply, maintenance, transportation, and distribution. Manage the total life-cycle through integration of acquisition and logistics processes. Meet deployment and sustainment requirements across the full spectrum of military operations. Guarantee joint total asset visibility through fully integrated, secure information systems, with asset visibility being the capability for users to view information on the identity and status of Defense material assets and, in some cases, complete a business transaction using that information. Meet or exceed the Department of Defense logistics metrics and cost- reduction goals. To address the above criteria, the Logistics Strategic Plan includes six broad objectives developed by the Logistics Reform Senior Steering Group to assist logistics managers in planning and executing the Department’s priority initiatives for transforming logistics. The objectives are as follows: Optimize support to the warfighter. Improve strategic mobility to meet warfighter requirements. Implement customer wait time as the Department-wide logistics metric. Fully implement total asset visibility across the Department of Defense. Reengineer and modernize applicable logistics processes and systems. Minimize logistics costs while meeting warfighter requirements. The Department’s Fiscal Year 2000 Logistics Strategic Plan directed the services and Defense commands to develop implementing plans that reflect the vision, objectives, and metrics of the Department-wide plan. The plan also specified that the implementing strategies and related plans are governed in content and format by the provisions of the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (P.L. 103-62), commonly referred to as the Results Act. As such, these plans should include detailed actions, performance measures, completion dates, and resource requirements. To support the implementation of the Logistics Strategic Plan, the Deputy Secretary of Defense directed the military services, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. Transportation Command in a March 23, 2000, directive entitled the Department of Defense Reform Initiative #54, to establish logistics transformation plans for submission to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. This directive also provided guidance for the preparation of these plans, which were intended to serve as vehicles for aligning the military component initiatives, documenting their approach for achieving the objectives in the Department’s Logistics Strategic Plan, and obtaining resources. Appendix I provides an overview of the logistics reengineering initiatives that each of the components is individually pursuing as part of its transformation plan. We reported in December 1996 that the Department’s 1994 version of its Logistics Strategic Plan contained similar weaknesses to those outlined in this report. Specifically, we reported that the 1994 version of the plan did not adequately (1) link the action plans to resource requirements, (2) link the services’ and the Defense Logistics Agency’s plans to the strategic plan, or (3) identify interim approaches that could be developed and implemented when milestones of a priority strategy had been extended. Other related GAO reports and testimonies are listed on the last page of this report. While the Department-wide Logistics Strategic Plan outlines six key objectives and a general time frame for implementation, it is not sufficiently comprehensive and does not provide an adequate framework for guiding the military services’, the Defense Logistics Agency’s, and the U.S. Transportation Command’s logistics reengineering initiatives. Specifically, the plan does not address the logistics lifecycle process from acquisition through support and system disposal. In addition, the Department’s plan does not specify how the Department will be organized in the future to fulfill the logistics requirements that will be needed to support the National Military Strategy or how the Department will eventually attain a new logistics structure. The Department’s plan identifies that the logistics vision is that, by fiscal year 2006, the joint logistics process will be a highly efficient, integrated system that ensures required support to the warfighter. This vision, however, does not identify the logistics requirements the Department will have to fulfill, how it will be organized to fulfill these requirements, or who will be responsible for providing specific types of logistics support. Furthermore, while the Department will likely face further changes in size and structure in the near future, its strategic plan has not identified the logistics facilities or personnel it will need to support future logistics requirements and has not specified a process for determining what resources it will need. Without addressing all logistics functions, as well as these facilities and personnel requirements through its strategic planning process, the Department will be unable to identify the resources (i.e., maintenance facilities, storage capacity, transportation assets, and depot personnel) it will need to support the Department’s future logistics concepts. In assessing the Logistics Strategic Plan, we also reviewed the relationship between the Department’s logistics architecture initiative and the strategic plan. The architecture initiative is intended to provide a strategic framework to synchronize logistics improvements for the years 2010 and beyond and to define a Department-wide logistics organization. In a previous report on the Department of Defense’s reengineering initiatives, we identified that in October 1999, the Department established the Office of the Assistant Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Logistics Architecture to oversee defense logistics reengineering efforts. This office was given responsibility for designing a logistics system for business processes, physical infrastructure, and information technologies, as well as for defining the services’ responsibilities within the new logistics architecture. With the assistance of a contractor, the Office began work on an integrated logistics architecture that was intended to facilitate the implementation of reengineered logistics support processes and procedures. To some extent, this logistics concept was intended to address the logistics facilities and personnel requirements. This project has progressed slowly and it is not clear how it will fit into the Department’s Logistics Strategic Plan. A planned report on the contractor study has not yet been completed. Further, according to defense officials, this planning effort may be refocused to incorporate the vision of the Department’s new leadership regarding how future logistics planning should proceed. The title of the office overseeing this effort has been changed to the Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Logistics Plans and Programs and its stated mission has been expanded to cover the entire future logistics environment. The Office is pursuing an approved long-term logistics planning strategy and plans to identify specific operational efforts to undertake to move the Department along toward achieving that strategy. Nonetheless, service planning officials expressed concerns regarding the realism of this study effort and the extent to which the proposed concept would work in wartime. They also questioned how this effort fits in with other planning initiatives, such as the Logistics Strategic Plan. Therefore, it is too early for us to determine whether this new concept for logistics support planning is an effective one, whether it will be accepted throughout the Department, and whether it will be feasible for future implementation. While each of the military services, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. Transportation Command prepared implementation plans in the form of transformation plans and other documents to support the Logistics Strategic Plan, these plans will not likely result in overall improvements to the economy and efficiency of logistics activities. We found that these plans (1) are not always consistent with the actions in the Defense-wide plan, (2) are not directly related to the Defense-wide plan or to each other, and (3) do not contain some key management elements as outlined in the Results Act, such as performance measures and specific milestones. According to officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the components’ plans were generally a summation of ongoing initiatives reformatted to support the Department-wide generic objectives and did not include any new initiatives. According to Air Force officials, one contributing factor to this lack of any new initiatives was that the approximately 3 months the components were given to prepare their implementation plans was insufficient given the scope of the task. The military services, the Defense Logistics Agency, and the U.S. Transportation Command have initiated implementation actions to address the Department’s six objectives set forth in the Department-wide strategic plan. Tables 2 through 7 outline the six strategic objectives and the stated performance measures and provide a summary of the weaknesses we identified in the corresponding parts of the components’ implementation plans. A more detailed discussion of our findings related to each objective follows the individual tables. While we found that each component, with the exception of the U.S. Transportation Command, addressed this objective, mission capable rates are not defined and/or measured the same among the components. For example, to measure mission capable rates, the Army plans to use the percent of equipment that is fully mission capable and the revised readiness report for tracking mission capable rates. These readiness reports are embedded in the development of the Army’s Global Combat Support System. However, this system has not been fielded Army-wide. The Air Force, on the other hand, uses historical and forecasted aggregate aircraft mission capable rates to measure readiness and has implemented four initiatives to improve logistical support to the warfighter—aircraft spare parts availability, informational advancements, reengineered logistical support concepts, and supply chain management. Many of the Marine Corps initiatives to support this objective are still under development. The Navy included a sample of 12 ongoing initiatives to support this objective. These initiatives, however, are not directly linked to defining or measuring mission capable rates.