DOD may be unable to prevent an attack using chemical or biological weapons. Therefore, DOD has determined that servicemembers must be protected to survive and conduct effective military operations. Consequently, DOD supplies servicemembers with a protective ensemble consisting of a suit, mask with breathing filter, rubber boots, butyl gloves, and hoods as required. Figure 1 displays the components that comprise a protective ensemble. During Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm, DOD noted that most of this equipment (1) could cause unacceptable heat stress to the wearer, (2) could limit freedom of movement and impair job performance, (3) is bulky, and (4) is not fully interoperable across the services. Furthermore, most of the existing suits (1) are no longer manufactured, (2) can be used for up to 14 years from the date of manufacture, and (3) will expire by 2007. To address these issues, DOD developed new, lightweight individual protective equipment such as the Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology (JSLIST) trousers and coat to replace the current protective suits. DOD began procuring the JSLIST suits in 1997. An improved multipurpose overboot is in procurement and new protective gloves are under development to improve manual dexterity and/or reduce heat stress on the wearer. Similarly, since the existing masks may cause some breathing difficulty, DOD is developing a new mask but does not expect to begin procurement until fiscal year 2006. During fiscal years 2002 through 2007, DOD plans to spend about $5.7 billion on planning for chemical and biological defense, acquisition of defense equipment, facilities construction, and research and development. In 1999, we recommended that DOD develop a performance plan guided by outcome-oriented management principles embodied in the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 (Pub. L. 103-62). DOD created a plan; however, performance goals and measures were being developed at the time of our review. DOD’s assessment process for determining the risk to military operations is unreliable, and, as a result, the Department’s current determination that the risk is generally low is inaccurate. Although the Department uses the Chemical and Biological Defense Program Annual Report to Congress to indicate its readiness for operations in a chemically and biologically contaminated environment, the 2000 report contains erroneous inventory data and understates equipment requirements. More important, the methodology for assessing the risk is flawed because it is not based on the number of complete ensembles needed and it obscures military service readiness by combining service data and reporting the results jointly. DOD’s criteria for assessing the risk of wartime shortages is to determine the numbers of protective suits, masks, breathing filters, gloves, boots, and hoods it has on hand, compare them against the requirements for those individual items, and then assign risk. (See table 1) In the draft fiscal year 2001 annual report to Congress provided to us in June 2001, DOD reported that it was generally at low risk for suits.However, the risk assessment process was flawed in part because DOD used erroneous data on protective suits. For example DOD made computational errors in comparing the older suits and JSLIST suits against a combined total suit requirement, the Air Force overreported its suit requirement by 801,167 suits, DOD reported it had 1,229,935 JSLIST suits on hand as of September 30, 2000, but overcounted its inventory by 782,232 JSLIST suits, the Navy included about 117,000 suits that had passed their expiration dates and were therefore unusable, and the Army underreported its suit stocks by an estimated 231,050 suits. These errors occurred in large part as the result of problems in DOD’s systems for managing protective suit inventories. We believe that the services collectively had no more than 4,348,999 suits of all types on hand as of September 30, 2000. When we included all the suits for wartime use and adjusted the numbers to account for the errors and miscounts, the risk category changed to high for suits, as shown in table 2. In February 2001, the military services informed the Joint Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Board that equipment requirements were actually much higher than those reported to Congress and included in the fiscal year 2001 Logistics Support Plan. The board subsequently accepted the new requirements. Based on these new requirements, the risk remained high for suits; changed to high for filters, boots, and hoods; and remained low for gloves and masks, as shown by comparing the risk level columns in tables 2 and 3. DOD has inaccurately assessed the risk to military operations by determining the number of individual items of equipment it has on hand and by combining the services’ inventories of individual items. Service guidance specifies that a total of 1,573,866 active and reserve servicemembers need protection to meet current operations plan requirements. DOD provides each deploying servicemember with up to four ensembles either at deployment or held in war reserve and distributed to theater operating forces when needed. The ensembles consist of five components: (1) four protective suits, (2) between four and eight pairs of gloves and boots, (3) between four and eight hoods, (4) up to four breathing filters, and (5) one mask. Because DOD does not report each service’s readiness based on the equipment it has on hand, but rather provides a joint assessment, critical service shortages or opportunities for cross-service assistance tend to be obscured. In fact, each service reported shortages of one component of the ensemble. Specifically, the Army reported critical shortages of hoods; the Air Force reported shortages of gloves; the Navy, shortages of suits; the Marine Corps, shortages of boots. When we compared the number of ensembles required by each service’s guidance and applied the DOD risk criteria, the risk was high for all four services. As a result, DOD cannot provide all the required ensembles for 682,331 servicemembers scheduled for wartime deployment, as shown in table 4. The risk posed by suit shortages is likely to worsen through 2007 due to increasing rates of older suits’ expiration and DOD’s plan not to replace all of them. As of October 1, 2000, DOD reported a shortage of about 1.7 million protective suits; it believes about 3.3 million, or 75 percent, of the current suit inventory will expire by 2006. JSLIST suits cost about $203 each compared to about $80 each for most of the existing suits, and DOD plans to buy only about 2.8 million JSLIST suits as replacements. Therefore, the shortage will increase to about 2.2 million suits by 2006. DOD’s plan to buy fewer new suits is also influenced by expiration of the suits and budgetary considerations. By replacing suits at a rate slower than the expiration rate, DOD plans to spread future suit purchases over more years to avoid a disproportionately large amount of suits expiring in any one year. This tactic allows greater dispersion of future suit expirations and replacement costs but is likely to also increase the short-term risk of wartime shortages. DOD is attempting to mitigate some of the shortages. For example, the Army plans to procure more than 500,000 hoods through fiscal year 2002, and the Defense Logistics Agency was procuring more of the existing generation of boots at the time of our report. Some opportunities also exist for one service to assist another. For example, the Army and Marine Corps reported significantly more gloves on hand than required and could transfer some to the Air Force to offset Air Force shortfalls since all the services use the same gloves. However, other available equipment is not interoperable and cannot be easily shared. For example, the Navy and Marine Corps suits are hooded, so they do not have separate hoods and therefore cannot help alleviate the Army’s shortage. If all goes according to plan, such interoperability problems should ease after fiscal year 2006, as all four services begin using the JSLIST suit and new joint masks, gloves, and boots. Shortcomings in DOD’s inventory management of chemical and biological protective equipment adversely affect the Department’s ability to accurately assess the readiness of the services to meet requirements for the equipment and mitigate the risk of shortages. DOD’s current inventory information on chemical and biological equipment is unreliable for making an accurate risk assessment because DOD and the services cannot easily link inventory records; lack data on suit expiration dates; cannot easily identify, track, and locate defective suits; and have miscalculated the requirements and the number of suits available. These shortcomings are consistent with long-term problems in DOD’s inventory management that we have consistently identified since 1990 as a high-risk area due to a variety of problems, including ineffective and wasteful management systems and procedures. The Defense Logistics Agency and the military services store war reserve inventories of chemical and biological protective suits and other equipment at a variety of depots, warehouses, and storage facilities and as noted earlier, use at least nine different inventory systems to manage the inventories. However, because these systems are not linked, DOD-wide oversight of the inventories is restricted, and the systems are not used to directly support the inventory data in the annual report to Congress and the Logistics Support Plan. Instead, DOD makes an additional effort to collect data theoretically already in the systems. The data collection requires units and depots that store the chemical protective equipment to provide separate data on the equipment annually and relies heavily on government and contractor personnel to manually compile the data. Although DOD has at least nine major inventory management systems, it cannot accurately determine the expiration rate of most of the older suits used by the Air Force and Army. These account for about 3.3 million of the current suit inventory and can be used for up to 14 years from the date of manufacture after which testing has determined that the suits cannot be used in a contaminated environment.