By ANTARA,
Washington : Many major US weapons programs are running over budget and lagging behind promised production schedules, a report by an independent US auditor said Monday.
The cost of the 96 largest defense programs reached 1.6 trillion dollars in the 2008 fiscal year, 25 percent higher than initially budgeted, said the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress.
For these weapons projects, “the average delay in delivering initial capabilities has increased to 22 months,” the GAO report was quoted by AFP as saying.
The cost overruns and delays were partly due to older weapons programs, with newer projects tending to operate more within planned budgets and production schedules, it said.
The report comes as President Barack Obama’s administration seeks to scale back some costly weapons programs in the vast US defense budget, the world’s largest.
Obama has proposed 533.7 billion dollars for the main defense budget, which does not include most of the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The president and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have vowed to slash wasteful defense contracts and reform the way the Pentagon funds new weapons.
One of the projects facing possible budget cuts is a hi-tech network linking US Army soldiers and vehicles, called Future Combat Systems (FCS), led by defense industry giant Boeing.
The GAO said the cost of the Future Combat Systems’ project reached 130 billion at the end of 2007, an increase of 44.5 percent compared to initial estimates in 2003.
The cost of the F-22 Raptor fighter jet, a Lockheed Martin aircraft, rose to about 5.9 billion dollars, an increase of 62.7 percent over its initial 2003 budget. And the program is running 33 months behind its promised timeline, according to the GAO.