A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense's (DOD) 2012 Biennial Core Report complies with two of the three biennial reporting elements of Section 2464 by including information on core capability requirements and planned workloads available for maintaining these requirements. The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) reported core capability requirements totaling about 70 million direct labor hours for the military services. Also, OSD reported a total of about 92 million direct labor hours for planned workloads with an estimated cost of about $12 billion. OSD reported complete information on core requirements and planned workload at the top-level categories, such as Sea Ships, of the work breakdown structure. The statute directs that this information be organized by work breakdown structure, which is a group of categories of equipment and technologies. The top-level category--an entire type of system or equipment--can be broken down into lower levels of detail or subcategories, such as Aircraft Carriers or Submarines, that make up the system or equipment. DOD's overall planned workloads exceed its core capability requirements, but the report shows shortfalls in certain categories for the Army and the Air Force."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The key issues, based on existing GAO work, suggest specific areas for oversight on the following topics:"

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO has previously reported that the SM-3 Block IIB program did not conduct a formal analysis of alternatives (AoA) prior to beginning technology development. AoAs provide insight into the technical feasibility and costs of alternatives by determining if a concept can be developed and produced within existing resources. Although the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is not required to do an AoA for its programs because of its acquisition flexibilities, GAO has previously reported that an AoA can be a key step to ensure that new programs have a sound acquisition basis."