Every summer for nearly a quarter century, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has handed Congress a report card on the Pentagon’s most expensive weapons. Every summer, the grades look stubbornly similar. This year’s edition, the watchdog’s 24th annual weapon systems assessment, arrived on July 2 with a familiar verdict rendered in the measured prose of auditors: The Department of Defense “continues to struggle to deliver technologies quickly and within budget.”
The report examines 104 of the department’s costliest programs, a portfolio in which the Pentagon “plans to invest over $2.4 trillion to develop and acquire its costliest weapon programs.”
What that money has bought, increasingly, is waiting. “The overall average time frame to deliver a capability increased this year to over 12 years,” the GAO found, adding that “schedule delays persisted across MDAPs, signaling overly optimistic time frames.”
Several major programs declined to set new delivery dates even as they pushed back interim milestones, a habit the auditors treated as a warning sign rather than a virtue. “By keeping delivery dates static, these programs raise questions about how realistic their estimates are,” the report notes, concluding that “the 12-year average will likely increase in the future.”
The findings land amid yet another round of Pentagon reform. The department rolled out its Acquisition Transformation Strategy in November 2025, promising rapid delivery of solutions to warfighting needs. But the GAO observes that it reviewed similar efforts in 2024 and 2025 and found the department struggling to execute them, producing “a status quo of slow, linear development approaches.”
Nowhere was the gap between ambition and execution clearer than in the middle tier of acquisition, or MTA, a pathway Congress created so the Pentagon could prototype and field weapons within five years. The department planned to invest at least $49 billion across 23 of its most expensive MTA programs, and the portfolio kept growing as bigger and slower programs adopted the label.
The problem, the GAO finds, is that the fast lane kept filling with technology that was not ready to move fast. “Between 2018 and 2025, 18 out of 40 programs have entered the MTA pathway with immature technologies,” the report stated, and technologies for seven of the eight programs currently on the pathway “remain immature and will require additional development.” Nine programs that entered with multiple immature technologies made “limited progress” maturing them, which the auditors warned “could delay delivering fieldable capabilities to the warfighter.”
The program-level details read like a catalog of slippage. The Air Force’s Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile, already trimmed from seven planned test flights to five, has “effectively zero margin left in the schedule for the rapid prototyping effort.” The second battery of the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon fell at least six months behind owing to “missing, inconsistent, and unclear work standards for missile production.”
The Space Force’s Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared missile warning satellite absorbed roughly $340 million in sensor cost growth attributed to “software development complexity and engineering challenges,” and its first satellite was finished in January 2026, four months late.
The Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray refueling drone slid by two and a half years, while the service’s next destroyer fared worse on paper than in the water: “The Navy’s business case for the DDG(X) program is not apparent,” the GAO writes.
Beneath the individual failures, the report identifies a deeper pattern. Most programs the GAO has reviewed, including the newer fast-track efforts, have not fully adopted leading practices for product development, such as fielding a minimum viable product and iterating on it.
The watchdog notes it had recommended since 2022 that the Pentagon revamp its acquisition, testing, and engineering policies along those lines, and that the department concurred with many recommendations but has yet to fully implement them.
This year the GAO issues a single new recommendation: that rapid delivery programs be required to start “with only technologies considered mature or develop associated immature technologies separate from the program effort.”
Top photo: US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks to Sailors and Marines in Singapore in May 2026 (Tyler Miles/US Navy/Wikimedia Commons)
.jpg){kind=link}