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Reports from AUSA Logistics Symposium and Exposition
05/18/2006
- Future Combat Systems – On Schedule, in Field by 2008
- Griffin: ‘Don’t Give Up; Don’t Slow Down’
- Reset-Training Cycles Prepare Units for Redeployment
- 60,000 Civilian Contractors in Iraq Provide Services to Soldiers
- New Army Sustainment Command will Eliminate Seams
- Bell: Put Logistics in the Process from the Start
- DLA Improves Material Availability, Working on Forecasting, Director Says
- U.S. Contribution to Darfur Effort Likely to be Strategic Airlift
- Restoring Soldiers’ Faith in Weapon is Command’s Goal
Future Combat Systems – On Schedule, in Field by 2008
The first element of the Future Combat Systems is on schedule to be in the field by 2008, according to FCS program managers.
Originally planned to be an “all-for-one” program to be introduced at the end of the decade, the intent of FCS changed to phase individual elements into the current force as soon as each one is ready for deployment.
“Developing a combat system for the future and not dealing with the requirements of the current force just wasn’t good practice,” Lt. Gen. Daniel R. Zanini, USA, Ret., the FCS program manager for Science Applications International Corporation, said during a session at the Association of the United States Army’s Logistics Symposium and Exhibition in Richmond, Va., May 16.
The first element available will be a precision attack system that links ground vehicles such as Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks. Sensors on the ground and in the air will transmit real-time information allowing for coordinated attacks.
Adversaries against the United States, namely insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, “are constantly trying to close the gap,” Philip Hodges, the FCS deputy program manager for supportability, said. “FCS gives us the opportunity to widen that gap again. It gives us very significant and decisive battlefield intelligence.”
From a logistics standpoint, FCS elements will give U.S. forces a “reduced [logistics] footprint, which is terribly important not only in affordability but supportability on the battlefield,” Hodges said.
Hodges pointed out that FCS is being designed to allow crews to repair 80 percent of the problems on their platform while still in the field. This includes manned systems and vehicles as well as unmanned vehicles.
The equipment will also share 70 percent of the same parts, Hodges said, which will mean less “special tools” required for maintenance.
This will lead to “pit stop engineering,” Hodges said. Like mechanics on a race team, elements are designed so troops in the field can perform maintenance tasks in a minimal amount of time.
For example, Zanini noted a recent challenge that Army Materiel Command gave to the manufacturers of the Humvee. Where it once took five hours to swap an engine, the Humvee was designed so two people could do it in 10 minutes.
Two significant events have already taken place this year for FCS testing, Zanini said. “Phase 0” testing took place at a system-to-system laboratory in Huntington Beach, Calif., that allowed FCS partners to link with each other. Significant progress was also made at the Joint Field Exercise at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
The objectives for the rest of 2006 remain “on track,” Hodges said. “We’re well beyond the PowerPoint stage and into the design of these platforms.”
Adding, “This is the point in time where you absolutely have to consider logistics, flexibility, testability and especially reliability in the design phase.”
Hodges noted that more than $20 million alone has been earmarked for the next several years to enhance FCS reliability.
By the third quarter of 2007, a brigade combat team will be established at Fort Bliss, Texas, to evaluate FCS elements.
“What that brigade does for us is allows us to put that equipment into the hands of soldiers very early-on in the design process, and allows soldiers to provide feedback in its design and development,” Zanini said.
As equipment and technology mature, they will “flow directly to the combat force,” Zanini said.
FCS elements will be phased into the force through the early part of the next decade.
Those elements will give all troops on the ground or in the air a real-time communications capability, Hodges said.
“It truly is a joint operational environment,” he said.
Griffin: ‘Don’t Give Up; Don’t Slow Down’
Saying “we’ve come a long way” in operations, logistics and maintenance, the commanding general of the Army Materiel Command told attendees at a special Association of the United States Army symposium and exposition that “we’ve got to get better” at integrating operations, logistics and maintenance.
Gen. Benjamin Griffin, speaking May 18 in Richmond, Va., told attendees: “Don’t give up; don’t slow down,” in their efforts to integrate the three areas.
Adding, the key lay in the life cycle management commands – especially in resetting the force for modular formations using the best techniques of knowledge management.
“The challenge is to get it back into the system, and when we go to modular, we need more equipment” because the size of the brigade combat team has grown. “Who’s got the lead? The life cycle management commands.”
He added that each of these command is different, and the reset challenges are different for aviation, tank-automotive, ammunition, etc.
Reset-Training Cycles Prepare Units for Redeployment
The Army Force Generation Model “is an emerging idea” focused on how units are equipped, manned and trained, the director of the center for logistics readiness in the Army G4 office said.
Brig. Gen. James Chambers, speaking at an Association of the United States Army symposium and exposition May 18, said the Army is paying particular attention to the time when a unit transfers authority in Afghanistan or Iraq to another unit, and when it begins resetting itself in the training-readiness cycle.
The model calls for active forces to be on a three-year cycle of reset-training, ready and available for redeployment; the National Guard a six-year cycle; and the Army Reserve a five-year cycle.
Later in answer to a question, he said, “How long should that time be? Thirty days, 45 days? We believe reset training beings at the transfer of authority.”
One of the keys to making the model work effectively is tracking units at the Army level, knowing how it is manned, equipped and trained. “The MACOMs [major Army commands] do that fairly well, [but] there is not a global view.”
Chambers said that for unit commanders, the process actually starts before the transfer of authority in answering questions about what equipment is going to be left behind, what equipment has to be reset, where are you going to do the work, how many soldiers do you lose to permanent changes of station, how many do you lose to military schools and more.
“Our redeployment does not have the same tension of deployment,” meaning adherence to tight timetables. “I’m telling you the tension is there,” when commanders say: ‘You’ve got to get the equipment back to me more quickly.’”
He said one reason commanders will be asking that question more often is “we don’t have enough equipment. … We have to move it around,” and the days of believing that particular pieces of equipment belonged to a specific unit are gone.
To get equipment back to units more quickly, the Army is considering sending it back to those units for work -- to bring a truck, for example, back to standard. Chambers said that work could be done by soldiers in the maintenance company or by contractors.
60,000 Civilian Contractors in Iraq Provide Services to Soldiers
Contractors are more involved in military operations than they have ever been, a senior vice president for KBR Government and Infrastructure told attendees at a symposium and exposition in Richmond May 18.
Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano Jr., USA, Ret., said “The ratio of contractors to forces was one to 100 in Vietnam, Desert Storm was one to 32 and most were technical representatives in rear combat zones. Today, it’s one to four in all facets of the operations.”
He said that there are 60,000 contractors in Iraq now providing everything from water purification to security. About 55,000 of those are KBR employees, he said. Twenty-thousand are U.S. citizens and the reset are Iraqis or from a third country. “They are there to augment, supplement the team.”
For KBR in Iraq, its contracting force had to grow from the hundreds being used in Bosnia and Kosovo to the 55,000 in Iraq, “We took over a Montgomery Ward’s mall in Houston to find the people we needed.”
He said they brought a host of skills with them – from truck driving to the skilled trades to specialized accounting knowledge. “We have employees from all walks of life.”
He said that KBR is turning out about 250 people a week to work in Iraq for a year. In 2003 -- 2004, “it was 600 people a week.”
Seventy to 75 percent of the employees complete the year; and Cosumano said of those 30 percent stay longer because “they feel they are part of a team”
Cosumano said that the company had to answer personnel questions about how it would get these employees into theater, originally on military flights and now on special charters; how to insure; how to notify families about injuries, illnesses or deaths. It also had to set up regional commodity buying services in an area where none existed.
He told industry attendees, “You need to hire local nationals – guys who can lease trucks, welders who can do the job” -- because they know their home areas and it provides local jobs that can help that economy.
Cosumano said that those were the reasons the “Afghans First” program was established.
Citing a Congressional Budget Office study of contractors versus using military personnel over the 20 years of the logistics contract program, Cosumano said there was a savings of about $50 billion.
Cosumano said that if it was a short-term study the contractor would cost more than using military personnel.
New Army Sustainment Command will Eliminate Seams
When the Army’s Sustainment Command stands up in October, it will give a three-tiered strategy to support the Army both in the continental United States – a first for U.S. Army Forces Command and overseas -- the deputy commanding general of the Army Materiel Command told attendees at a Richmond symposium and exposition.
Lt. Gen. William Mortensen, speaking at the Association of the United States Army event May 18, said that the two-star general leading the command will be headquartered at Rock Island, Ill., and the command will be non-deployable, meaning it will be available continuously.
The new command will have 250 soldiers assigned to it.
In a way, “it is the blurring of the lines between institutional forces and the deploying force,” Maj. Gen. Mitchell H. Stevenson, commanding general of the Combined Arms Support Command and Fort Lee, Va., said.
The Sustainment Command “will eliminate the seams between strategic, operational and tactical,” Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody, deputy chief of staff G4, said.
It will also give the Army “command and control of logistics,” which would correct a situation of having to leave a command in theater to keep the capability near the warfight, and rotate individuals to man it.
The new command will be built around seven Army field support brigades two for the continental United State and the other five for overseas, and will manage the logistics contracting program around the world and the pre-positioned stocks afloat and ashore.
The deputy commanding general for field support “will support operations for the Army Force Generation Model, [have responsibility for] reset and property accountability,” Mortensen said.
He drew parallels with existing Army command structures, such as Army field support brigades aligning with corps headquarters and deployable with them; logistics support elements aligning with a division headquarters and deployable with them and the brigade logistic support team and organic to the brigade.
At the same time, he said that logistics support elements of varying sizes would be available to installations that are not part of a division or corps structure to take care of training sets, especially at Army Training and Doctrine Command posts.
Stevenson said that for the first time his command is writing doctrine with the assistance of specialists in acquisition and other fields who have a broad perspective.
He expects the field manual for the Sustainment Command to be ready by the first quarter of 2007.
Bell: Put Logistics in the Process from the Start
One of the Defense Department’s top experts in readiness said the Pentagon needs to think differently about how it supports efforts in difficult- to-reach areas, such as Darfur in Sudan; the impact of the “long war” on resetting equipment; ensuring that stability operations receive equal attention as combat operations; and the department’s response to natural disasters.
Speaking May 18 at an Association of the United States Army symposium and exposition in Richmond, Va., P. Jackson Bell, deputy under secretary of defense for logistics and material readiness, said that in thinking differently about crises such as Darfur means finding ways to deploy depot capability to sustain these operations.
On the impact of the “long war“ on equipment, he said it was possible to move funding reset to basic appropriations from supplementals, but that move would have an impact on other areas of the defense budget.
The question about stability operations was “how to win the peace” by knowing what the political and military objectives were.
When those are decided, there would be “different priorities of what kind of force would go and on what timetable.”
The strategic priority to “winning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq means winning the peace,” which means a different operating environment for the armed forces than even in the recent past.
In Bell’s view that requires the third generation of body armor for service members, all vehicles being up-armored, employing and experimenting with vehicles such as the South African designed Buffalo to counter the improvised explosive device threat and resurrecting older weapons such as the .50 caliber machine gun and the 45 caliber sidearm.
It also means not only training Afghans and Iraqis on how to use equipment, but also how to sustain operations and cleaning up the countryside of unspent ordnance. “That mission has not been assigned.”
Bell said that other effects on how to work stability operations would be felt on munitions flowing into the operations and “reconstituting equipment rather than on the GSA [General Services Administration] schedule.”
For special forces in these operations, the logistics demands would include precision air drops to sustain them, and what would be the “role of civilians in the battlespace [at a time when the military] is increasingly dependent on them” for basic services and technical expertise.
With regard to natural disasters such as the Pacific and Indian oceans tsunamis, the Pakistani earthquake and the Atlantic and Gulf Coast hurricanes, Bell said there was a changing perception of what the public expects from the Department of Defense.
“DoD is being compressed into a role of early or first responders.”
In the future, “We cannot afford to avoid the pressure build-up on the Hill and localities” to act.
He said that the biggest, longest lasting change in the department is the movement of 70,000 service members and their families from Europe and Korea, primarily, back to the United States in the next few years.
The move means that the United States will need more than its current fleet of 117 C-17s and ships to move supplies and personnel to trouble spots and serve as sea bases for military operations.
“How do we get that stuff ashore” in a time when we are increasingly involved in regions that are difficult to access? “How do we project? How do we sustain?”
Bell said that one key to answering those questions was information management in developing realistic plans that put logistics in the process from the start and maintain “real-time usage data and not a guy filling out a form over 18 hours.”
DLA Improves Material Availability, Working on Forecasting, Director Says
The Defense Logistics Agency has made “significant improvements in material availability,” its director told attendees at an Association of the United States Army symposium and exposition in Richmond, Va. But, it still needs to improve asset visibility, joint coordination, its forecasting skills and its responsiveness to the industrial base.
Speaking May 18, Vice Adm. Keith M. Lippert said one step in improving its forecasting skills has been changes in its procedures to meet requests from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of a natural disaster, such as last year’s Hurricane Katrina. In the days and weeks after the storm, DLA shipped $400 million worth of material to the Gulf Coast.
So many Meals Ready to Eat were shipped, the agency “was down to levels so low had a world event happened,” such as the tsunami or Pakistan earthquake. “Twenty-five -- of 26 depots -- were involved” in the relief effort.
Lippert said that it also is changing some of the items it is shipping.
“MREs were never designed for 5-year-old children or an 85-year-old man. We have worked with suppliers to get meals like you would get on airlines with long shelf life.”
Lippert said the agency also created a deployable distribution depot to better handle FEMA requests on the scene.
Maj. Gen. Terry Juskowiak, USA, Ret., Army account lead for IBM, said that while nothing in the global war on terrorism has failed because of logistics “inadequate asset visibility is an age-old problem” as is collaborative planning before a military operation begins.
Eric Peltz, director of the military logistics program for RAND, agreed and said that planning would look at DLA and the services “in pre and early positioning of heavy items” that will be needed to continue military operations.
At the same time, reserve stocks cannot be allowed to decline in times of peace. “This is where the Army suffered in low reserve funding” before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Information remains the weakest link in the global supply chain,” Juskowiak said. Adding, “DoD can learn from corporate America” on how to use information technology for flexible military operations.
In IBM’s case, Juskowiak said the supply chain had a $40 billion inventory, with 19,000 employees handling 78,000 products.
“Our supply chain was a problem in 2002” that the company began seriously investigating ways to solve the problem.
“Technology is not the only solution. You need a draconian governing hand so no is flying below the radar” with special requests and shipment. “And fund it.”
There has been some “data sharing between the services and industry,” Gen. Benjamin Griffin, commanding general of Army Materiel Command, said, but more needs to be done “to maximize buying power across DoD.
U.S. Contribution to Darfur Effort Likely to be Strategic Airlift
Other than putting forces on the ground, the biggest commitment by the United States to the Darfur conflict in Africa will likely be strategic airlift, according to Lt. Gen. Claude V. Christianson, the director of logistics, J-4, for the Joint Staff.
However, France will likely take the lead for logistics support in the region, not the United States, Christianson speculated during a session May 18 at the Association of the United States Army’s logistics symposium and exposition in Richmond, Va.
“The French have a huge capability in Africa for logistics support that we don’t use at all,” he said.
He thinks U.S. involvement will be through bilateral agreements working with France and other countries that already have forces there on top of their long history of involvement in the region.
Focus worldwide has been drawn to the recent tensions rising in this volatile area of Sudan, which borders Chad in central Africa. Fighting has been ongoing since 2003, and the African Union’s peacekeeping force in Darfur – now numbering more than 7,000 -- has been unable to take control.
On May 15, the African Union agreed to transfer authority of its peacekeepers to the United Nations by the end of September. U.N. involvement hasn’t been finalized, but support was bolstered the next day when the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution urging Sudan to cooperate during the takeover.
Restoring Soldiers’ Faith in Weapon is Command’s Goal
Maj. Gen. William M. Lenaers said his goal was to “restore the faith of the soldier in his weapon.”
Lenaers, the commander of the Army Tank Automotive and Armaments Life Cycle Command, said after soldiers expressed concern about the reliability of the M249 machine gun, he wanted them to not only have confidence in that weapon, but also in all their small arms.
Now, two teams go out each month and repair 90 percent of a brigade’s weapons on site, from pistols to M4s to .50-caliber machine guns, Lenaers said. The teams of depot-level maintainers visit a brigade and re-set the weapons to “like new” conditions and average repairing “50 to 75 guns per week.”
The command is also challenged with resetting combat vehicles while, at the same time, upgrading them so they conform to modularization standards.
“Reset and modularity are not separate efforts,” Lenaers said. “They are combined efforts,” which is important so vehicles are not only fully repaired but are equipped with the latest capabilities and upgrades.
Under the Army’s Force Generation Model, 14 brigades a year will be reset, and this is critical, Lenaers said, with the continued involvement in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.
“That’s the new reality: how to equip that force quickly” while ensuring the equipment has all the latest advances and upgrades, he said.
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