Signs of weapon oversight dwindling

WASHINGTON -- A special Pentagon office created by Congress to review the performance of new weapons has not publicly released an assessment in four years, raising concerns that the Department of Defense's commitment to oversight is dwindling at a time when weapons spending is on the rise, according to current and former Pentagon officials.

The office of Operational Test and Evaluation still prepares annual reports, but none has been made public since 2002. Between 1998 and 2002, however, the office issued dozens of reports on weapons under development for the various military branches, according to a review of the record.

The public assessments raised questions about some weapons' effectiveness, and took issue with military contractors for delays or cost overruns. Political pressure often forced changes in the weapons' designs or production processes, according to defense officials.

But under Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the influence of the office has waned, according to a former director, congressional planners, and private defense specialists.

''I used to put my annual reports on the Web," said Philip Coyle, who ran the office during the Clinton administration, from 1994 to 2001. ''That stopped with the current Bush administration."

The office, which reports to Rumsfeld, has not had a permanent director for more than year. Meanwhile, a Government Accountability Office report found that military contractors were seeking ways to relax the testing regimen for new weapons. And a Pentagon study commissioned by Rumsfeld's top deputy recommended in January that some weapons testing be curtailed to speed up the process of getting new weapons into the field.

The Pentagon declined to say why the declassified test reports, which were once widely circulated on the Internet, now go in hard-copy form only to a few select congressional committee chairmen, a small group of Pentagon insiders, and, in a few cases, to chosen outlets of the defense industry press.

Acting Director David Duma declined to be interviewed, but his office's spokeswoman responded by e-mail to some questions.

The spokeswoman said the office's yearly assessment of weapons programs has been comprehensive, covering all 200 weapons systems under its purview. In addition to the annual reports, the office has produced three assessments on the missile defense program since 2001, but those reports are classified.

Meanwhile, the office says, it has produced 48 other reports since 2001 to help acquisition officials decide whether to approve various weapon systems for ''full-rate production."

But former defense officials and congressional staffers say the lack of circulation of the reports is more indicative of the Pentagon's attitude toward testing under Rumsfeld.

The reports were once a powerful tool to allow outsiders to scrutinize Pentagon spending and, they said, the current veil of secrecy seems intended to prevent any second-guessing of Rumsfeld's decision-making.

''The office has not panned out as intended," said Winslow Wheeler, who spent three decades as a Capitol Hill staffer and who coauthored the original legislation establishing the office in 1983.

The creation of the oversight office was prompted by a series of scandals revealing that crucial weapons had been mass-produced with serious engineering flaws.

The testing office was assigned to conduct independent assessments of weapons' effectiveness before the government committed billions of dollars. Congress aimed to help the Pentagon root out inefficiency, and to provide an outside check on Pentagon officials, whose cozy relationships with contractors had led to numerous scandals. To help maintain independence from the military leadership, the office's director can only be fired by the president.

But Wheeler, a former staffer for Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, said that under Rumsfeld and President Bush, the office has had neither the influence nor the independence that Congress intended.

''It has been swallowed by the rest of the Pentagon bureaucracy," Wheeler said.

Daniel Dupont, a defense specialist at InsideDefense.com, a clearinghouse for weapons and technology information, agreed, saying the office ''has definitely been emasculated over the years."

When its reports have reached the public, however, they can still create a firestorm. Last month, Congressional Quarterly reported that the oversight office had found that a minisubmarine designed to secretly deliver Navy commandos to foreign shores was flawed.

After the report's findings became public, the Navy froze the program, pending a reassessment.

But defense contractors are fighting back, contending that the office's oversight has delayed the deployment of new weapons.

A study presented to Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England by retired senior officers and defense contractors in January declared that the oversight office was too critical in its assessment of the weapons systems.

It recommended that guidelines be relaxed so that weapons systems that are not cleared by the oversight office can be provided to commanders in the field.

Coyle, the former testing director, said such a move ''would be a huge mistake." At a time when the military budget has soared to about half a trillion dollars a year, ''Testing is the last thing you would want to constrain," he said.

Thomas Christie, who succeeded Coyle as director, warned in a speech before defense industry officials in 2002 that many weapons program go into production before adequate testing has been completed, causing what he called a ''rush to failure."

He repeated those concerns in an article last month in the naval magazine Proceedings. ''Failure to identify technical issues . . . before entering into full-scale engineering," he wrote, has been ''the overwhelming cause" of delays and cost increases.

Bush's current nominee to be the deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics recently told Congress that he, too, believed independent oversight of new weapons is critically important.

''I believe that the independence of the [oversight office] is necessary . . . and serves to ensure that [weapon] systems are operationally effective and operationally suitable," James Finley told Congress.

But many outside observers are skeptical about whether he'll provide greater support for the oversight office than his predecessors.

''They are rolling in money and there is less discipline in how it is allocated," Loren Thompson, president and CEO of the Lexington Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank in Arlington, Va., said of the Pentagon brass. ''Rumsfeld's vision of transforming the military is driven more by ideology than demonstrated value. He is not interested in hearing what the testers have to say."

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.