The Armed Forces Sports Program needs better baseline statistics to prove it’s worth its nearly $3 million price tag, according to a recent report by the General Accountability Office.
The Armed Forces Sports Program has been a military mainstay since 1948, and hosts about two dozen sports for national and international competition.
The recent report found that the DoD program has not adequately shown that it can quantify how it is reaching its goals.
The report recommended that the program find a way to link its specific goals to data, to create measurable targets and to find a way to track trends in its data to “assess the program’s performance and progress over time.”
The statistics that the department collects on the program include total cost, total number of athletes and the amount of time athletes spend participating each year. None of these are valid indicators of the program’s success, the report said.
Last year, the program spent about $2.8 million with 848 service-member athletes. In 2012, the department spent closer to $2.1 million, despite having 120 more athletes enrolled, the report said.
In response, the DoD said that “the lack of a performance measurement does not negate the importance of pursuing objectives that contribute to demonstrating the program’s effectiveness,” according to the report.
After acknowledging the difficulties in implementing the GAO’s recommendations, the DoD said that it will review its policies and try to improve how it measures the program’s performance.
Armed Forces Sports Program needs better data, report says
