U.S. report rips Boeing, Raytheon quality controls on missile defense

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's internal watchdog on Monday said it found numerous quality control problems during an investigation of the troubled "kill vehicle", or warhead, built by Raytheon Co for the Boeing Co-led U.S. missile defense system.

In the report, the Pentagon's inspector general said quality standards were not met in 48 specific cases, involving issues that ranged from software testing, supply chain requirements and management of design changes that made the kill vehicle "suspectible to quality assurance failures."

It said the U.S. Missile Defense Agency agreed with its concerns and had already moved to address 44 of the 48 issues as part of a larger drive to improve quality controls.

The report was the first of two to be completed by the inspector general's office on the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) program, which completed the first successful intercept test in June after years of failures.