(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) In a damning report released Friday, the Government Accountability Office revealed that the U.S. Missile Defense Agency is lacking behind several foreign threats to the country. The findings shed light on yet another critical flaw within the Biden administration amid unprecedented threats from abroad.
According to the GAO report, MDA’s radar and missile interceptor systems have languished without much-needed upgrades despite several warnings and recommendations in recent years, according to the Washington Free Beacon. China, Iran and North Korea are among those countries actively threatening the U.S., effectively leaving the U.S. behind with rapidly evolving technologies.
GAO emphasized that the U.S. Department of Defense has spent over $194 billion, including a whopping $10 billion in 2022, to equip “operational commanders with a network of missile defense-related sensors, interceptors, and command and control capabilities.” Legislation, said the GAO, authorized the watchdog agency to assess the spending and whether the federal government is meeting its ends.
The watchdog agency issued a dire warning, saying, “As of June 2022, there were 23 previously issued recommendations that have not been implemented.” The report continued, “GAO continues to believe that implementing these recommendations related to testing, transparency, and cost reporting would help address acquisition issues.”
President Joe Biden was sworn into office in 2021, which means the Biden administration is responsible for following suit with the watchdog recommendations. “In fiscal year 2022, MDA did not deliver as planned the first increment of spiral 8.2-5, known as increment 6B.1, to allow for additional risk reduction testing and software fixes,” the report continued.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the federal agency only “partially met its sensor delivery goals” in 2022, which the federal watchdog claims “is consistent with its performance in prior years.”
Supply-chain issues, typical of the post-2020 COVID years, were among the issues that caused significant delays in the advancement of the technology. “The GMD program delivered two GroundBased Interceptors, one of which was 3 years overdue, but missed delivering the remaining interceptor planned for fiscal year 2022 by a few weeks,” the report found.
Biden in June 2022 invoked the Defense Production Act to expedite the homegrown production of clean energy, rather than focusing on the advancement of the nation’s missile defense systems.
As the nation continues to grapple with evolving threats from foreign adversaries, these damning findings could serve as a wake-up call for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and Biden officials to take immediate action to fix the mishaps found in the report.
