[Stars & Stripes] the new aircraft that defense officials have selected to watch over special operators working in austere environments and consider slowing its purchase of the planes, a federal watchdog warned in a new report.
The Government Accountability Office — an independent federal auditing agency — warned in a report published last week that U.S. Special Operations Command had yet to complete an analysis justifying its plans to purchase dozens of the new planes, dubbed OA-1K armed overwatch aircraft.
The warning follows a similar assessment completed by GAO in December when the watchdog urged SOCOM and the Defense Department to slow the $2 billion armed overwatch program until they could determine precisely how many of the new aircraft are needed. In its latest report — based on new findings including a classified assessment of SOCOM’s armed overwatch program — GAO suggested the Pentagon reevaluate the number of OA-1Ks needed, limit the purchases to testing aircraft for now, and study the risks and challenges special operators could face when supported by the planes. GAO officials wrote questions remained about how to use the new aircraft and the logistics programs needed to deploy them into the austere locations where they are believed to be most useful.
"It is essential that the Department of Defense act quickly to fully address GAO’s open recommendations," the report reads. "Otherwise, it risks buying more aircraft than it needs. In addition, it may not be able to fully utilize the aircraft because it has not addressed identified challenges." The GAO report did not elaborate on most of the challenges that it found with the OA-1K aircraft, which officials said are detailed in the classified report on the program. The OA-1K is a single-engine, turboprop aircraft manufactured by L3 Harris and Air Tractor. It is based on the manufacturers’ AT-802U Sky Warden, a heavily modified crop dusting-style plane that can be outfitted to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations and can carry 500-pound to 1,000-pound bombs and guns from .50-caliber machine guns to 20mm cannons. SOCOM earlier this year trimmed the OA-1K program from a planned 75-plane fleet down to 62 planes. The command said the cuts were based on budgeting issues and not based on the GAO’s recommendations in December.
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