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GAO-14-287R 1 (2014-01-13)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaahny0001 and id is 1 raw text is: G A O U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Washington, DC 20548 January 13, 2014 Congressional Committees Space Acquisitions: Assessment of Overhead Persistent Infrared Technology Report The Overhead Persistent Infrared (OPIR) mission area is supported by organizations within the Department of Defense (DOD) and intelligence community (IC) to ensure that missile threats are detected and reported to decision makers. The current Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) and legacy Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites support the OPIR mission in four areas: missile warning, missile defense, technical intelligence, and battlespace awareness. Over the past several years, DOD, through the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), has conducted research and development efforts to improve technologies to better address the OPIR mission area. Until recently, for example, the Air Force's Commercially Hosted Infrared Payload (CHIRP) demonstration sensor, employing wide field-of-view staring technology, collected OPIR data and provided insight into the applicability of this technology for the OPIR mission area.1 The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (NDAA), signed into law on January 2, 2013, required, among other things, that the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, submit a report on OPIR technology to the congressional defense committees no later than 180 days after the enactment of the act.2 The report was to identify DOD and IC's OPIR technology requirements; describe the strategy, plan and budget for current and next generation OPIR systems; and identify opportunities for further cooperation between the DOD and IC communities. DOD provided this report to the congressional defense committees on October 11, 2013. Additionally, the act mandated that GAO assess the comprehensiveness of the DOD OPIR technology report not later than 90 days after the date on which the Secretary of Defense submits DOD's report. To meet the requirements of the mandate, we assessed the extent to which the report (1) was comprehensive, fully supported, and sufficiently detailed; and (2) contained limitations that may have affected the quality of the report. Due to the classification level of the DOD OPIR report, we are issuing this unclassified report to formally meet the mandated reporting requirement; we have offered to brief the defense committees on the classified details of our findings. To assess the comprehensiveness of the information contained in the DOD OPIR report, we reviewed the information contained in the report, we interviewed people who had direct involvement in the report, and discussed the report's findings and methodology with them. We also reviewed and compared the 1996 SBIRS Operational Requirements Document, the 2002 SBIRS Operational Requirements Document, and 2010 Initial Capabilities Document for OPIR Enterprise to the requirements outlined in the OPIR report for completeness. We reviewed related and supporting studies, such as the 2012 Joint OPIR Integrated Space Trade (JOIST) 1 Launched on September 21, 2011, the Commercially Hosted Payload was decommissioned on December 6, 2013, after about 27 months of operations. 2 Pub. L. No. 112-239, § 915. GAO-14-287R Overhead Persistent Infrared Page 1

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