The Department of Defense's statutorily-mandated report on Regional Ballistic Missile Defense generally described plans and processes for regional missile defense. However, for the topics Congress required DOD to address, DOD has more comprehensive information which it could have provided to better reflect its current efforts and activities and which would benefit the congressional defense committees during their authorization and appropriation deliberations. One of these topics is a description of progress in system development and testing for the European Phased Adaptive Approach (a 2009 Presidential policy known as EPAA) and an assessment of technical and schedule risk. DOD's report characterizes technical and schedule risks as being minimized; based on GAO's body of work on missile defense, that characterization is optimistic. Since GAO's first review of EPAA in 2010, DOD has progressed in establishing some acquisition management practices for EPAA and has delivered some capabilities. But technical, schedule, and other risks remain. GAO sees three challenges DOD faces in its acquisition approach: (1) fully implementing a management process that synchronizes acquisition activities and ensures transparency and accountability; (2) improving execution of development and integration plans to stem fragmentation of development activities, schedule delays, and concurrency between key events; and (3) executing plans for tests and assessments so that these activities can be completed before MDA declares that a technical capability has been delivered. GAO concluded that MDA's decision to delay delivery of some capabilities for EPAA as compared to initial plans and make subsequent upgrades after EPAA phase declarations reflects the complexity of developing and integrating systems that provide an increasingly capable defense of Europe. While this approach allows flexibility, it does so at the risk of delivering less capability than expected without demonstrating the actual performance of what is delivered.