DOD's year 2000 vulnerabilities.

Though year 2000 worries are grabbing headlines everywhere, few nightmare scenarios are as obvious as those confronting the Department of Defense. It faces critical threats to its military readiness, operations, and security, observes the General Accounting Office (GAO) in two reports issued last month.

For decades, software programmers have abbreviated years by using just the last two digits. As the next century dawns and the date counters cycle back to 00, computers relying on two-digit dates can no longer distinguish between 2000 and 1900.

The key to identifying what Defense needs to fix, GAO believes, is a departmentwide inventory of all its computer systems. Defense has pointed to a database known as DIST--which catalogs its automated information systems--as a pivotal tool in its correction efforts. Yet GAO found that DIST users generally consider the system cumbersome, technologically antiquated, and rife with erroneous data. If these problems are not corrected immediately, GAO charges, the Defense Department's efforts "will be at risk of failing."

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) offers a window on the department's vulnerability. Located within Defense, DLA is dependent upon computers not only for securing and managing military supplies of food, fuel, medicine, and clothing but also for supporting more than 1,400 weapons systems. Other agencies rely on DLA to manage almost $1 trillion worth of contracts.

The agency is at work fixing the 86 automated information systems on which it will rely after 2000--programs containing some 39 million lines of computer code. However, GAO notes, DLA "has not yet taken the fundamental steps [for] ensuring the proper date information is passed between systems," nor has it adequately set priorities for which systems should be attended to first.

Recently, the Defense Department got a taste of what headaches lie in store, when a faulty year 2000-related date calculation inappropriately removed from inventory 90,000 items in DLA`s materiel management system. Correcting the problem took 400 hours.

So far, Defense has not explained in detail its planned year 2000 remedies to agencies and industrial contractors whose computers interface with DLA's, nor has it ensured that such interfacing programs will be fixed in time. If they aren't, GAO argues, "they can introduce and/or propagate errors into DLA systems."

Finally, GAO finds, DLA has not developed contingency plans "to establish the course of action that should be followed in the event that any of DLA's mission-critical systems are not corrected in time." Why not? "Officials told us that they expect all their systems to meet their year 2000 deadline and, for that reason, contingency plans are not needed," GAO reports.