When $178 Billion Is Not Enough

The US Department of Defense (DoD) spent approximately $187 Billion on its supply chain in the 2007 fiscal year. However on Monday, the General Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the plan to address on-going problems across the DoD’s supply chain, has fallen short of its goals. In July 2008, The DoD implemented a Logistics Roadmap to guide, measure, and track logistics improvements.

The report highlighted three specific areas where the roadmap has problems; it failed to identify the scope of logistics problems or gaps in logistics capabilities, it lacks outcome-based performance measures to assess and track progress towards goals, and it was not integrated with the DoD’s logistics decision-making processes.

The GAO has made a number of recommendations to the DoD which require the identification of the scope of the logistics problems and capability gaps, to develop, implement and monitor outcome-focused performance measures to assess progress, and to collect detailed information on the costs of the project.