Report to the Chairman , Subcommittee on Military Research and Development , Committee on Armed Services

Recent U.S. military operations, such as those in the Balkans, have shown that land mines continue to pose a significant threat to U.S. forces. U.S. land mine detection capabilities are limited and largely unchanged since the Second World War. A U.S. military that now uses million dollar cruise missiles, tens of million dollar aircraft, and billions of dollar ships still generally detects land mines with a metal detector and a probe. The Department of Defense (DOD) has an extensive research program aimed at developing new detectors to improve its capabilities. Improving DOD's land mine detection capability is a challenging technological issue. Because of the threat that land mines pose to U.S. armed forces, you requested that we assess the abilities of competing technological options to address DOD's mission needs for land mine detection. Specifically, our objectives were to determine whether DOD (1) employs an effective strategy for identifying and evaluating the most promising land mine detection technologies and (2) is investing in the most promising technologies to fully address mission needs. To evaluate DOD's strategy for identifying the most promising land mine detection technologies, we reviewed regulations, policies, and procedures, and interviewed DOD officials. To determine if DOD is investing in the most promising technologies to fully address mission needs, we identified prospective technological options by reviewing the literature connected with land mine detection technologies, interviewing researchers from universities and corporations and other federal agencies, and reviewing proposals that had been submitted in response to DOD solicitations to fund land mine detection research. We then developed and applied a systematic framework to evaluate the prospects of these technological options for meeting countermine mission needs to determine which were the most promising. (See app. I for a detailed discussion of our scope and methodology.) DOD's ability to make progress in substantially improving its land mine detection capabilities may be limited because DOD lacks an effective strategy for identifying and evaluating the most promising technologies. While DOD maintains an extensive program of outreach to external researchers and other nations' military research organizations, it does not use an effective methodology to evaluate all technological options to guide its investment decisions. More specifically, DOD has not identified all relevant mission needs to guide its research programs and does not systematically evaluate the broad range of potential technologies that could address those mission needs. In addition, its productive program of basic research for addressing fundamental …