“The recent successful flight test demonstrates our commitment to improving the kill vehicle’s quality and reliability,” Michael Doble, a Raytheon spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.

“We welcome the opportunity to redesign” the warhead and will work “closely with the Missile Defense Agency and our industry partners to make the kill vehicle more producible and reliable,” he said.

The Pentagon’s inspector general criticized some quality-control practices by Raytheon and Chicago-based Boeing in a report released this month. It dealt with issues including development of software for the warhead, the timely resolution of software defects and occasional failures by subcontractors to adhere to quality standards.

With more than 1,800 parts and 130,000 process steps, repairs and refurbishments are difficult and costly, making the warhead “susceptible to quality assurance failures,” according to the report.

While the companies mostly complied with industry quality standards, “some areas needed improvement,” the inspector general found.

The lapses showed that the Missile Defense Agency needed to improve procedures for software development, subcontractor quality and management of engineering changes, the inspector general said.

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