Food is an essential element of soldiers’ quality of life, and the U.S. Army is all in on modernizing its installation food program. Aimed at keeping up with the times and what soldiers today want and need, the service is holistically seeking to offer healthy, convenient and accessible options across installations.
In coordination with the Department of the Army and U.S. Army Combined Arms Support Command, U.S. Army Materiel Command (AMC) is leading efforts through new initiatives and programs to drive needed change in how, when and where soldiers eat. This generational overhaul is necessary to bring dining expectations in line with what troops are telling the Army they want, current industry standards and, most importantly, what they deserve and what the service owes them.
Facing Realities
The Army has not made major changes to its feeding model in decades. Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Randy George noted in October that the food modernization effort should not be a steady-state, evolutionary change of the status quo, but rather, a revolutionary transformation to bring the Army Food Program into the 21st century.
To do this, the Army must face the realities of force structure reductions, specifically culinary specialists, plus fiscal constraints, while creating a more modernized food service system to better support soldiers. The Army has not lost focus on providing a food model that delivers necessary nutritional readiness and dietary needs to soldiers as it prepares to fight and win the nation’s future wars.
The Army developed a food program strategy that addresses these issues, and, as part of the strategy, last fall AMC, as the service’s designated lead, established a governance structure that focuses on policy, training and installation services. This governance process is on a steady battle rhythm and meets weekly, monthly and quarterly at various levels to drive positive action and change.
Pursuing Efforts
Within this strategy, the Army is pursuing four lines of effort. The first addresses policy and programming issues. Sound policy and programming are critical to the food program’s future success and will enable all other lines of effort to be successful.
The second line of effort addresses the force development, modernization and institutional training of culinary specialists. Most importantly, this line of effort will ensure that tactical field feeding is optimized as the Army supports future multidomain operations.
The third line of effort, which is where my team is focused at AMC headquarters, addresses innovation and transformation of garrison and installation feeding. Specifically, we are looking at how to transform the Army’s installation food ecosystem in a revolutionary way.
The fourth line of effort builds on the previous one, as we optimize food-service operations across an installation to incorporate the entire food ecosystem.
Better Access
The Army food service model of the past for garrison and installation feeding had limited accessibility, both from a time and proximity perspective. To remedy that, the Army is developing ways to increase food options for soldiers.
By providing more food service options, it increases accessibility—both time and location—to points of need. The addition of food trucks, kiosks and “meal prep” packages for soldiers to use at their convenience has proven popular. But the food ecosystem needs to be expanded to a campus-style dining model, where the “campus” is the installation and includes the commissary, post exchange restaurants and Army Morale, Welfare and Recreation locations.
To realize this bold innovation, one of the projects AMC is working on is the ability for soldiers to use a card to verify and utilize their meal entitlements across the installation at these eateries. While the Army is working toward a pilot to allow this, we also want to ensure soldiers receive healthy, nutritious options as they use this feature, and our team continues to work on this with nutritionists and dietitians.
Listening to Soldiers
As the world has changed, so have soldier preferences, and we are listening more closely to soldiers. This past October through March, AMC dispatched “Tiger Teams” to map the unique food ecosystem at Army installations worldwide. These teams conducted deliberate, holistic assessments to better understand unique food program trends, mission demands and operational tempo concerns, as well as soldier preferences. Our enterprise-wide team of food service experts conducted focus groups and formal surveys, as well as solicited direct feedback from soldiers concerning their dining experience.
We are now analyzing those assessments to better understand not only Army-wide trends, but also trends specific to commands, units or geographic location. Based on command-specific feedback, senior commanders then can develop a plan that best meets the needs of their soldiers—the key being that not every installation is the same, so the Army needs an approach featuring tailorable, scalable options.
As the Army revolutionizes and transforms the food program, it is rethinking the spectrum of meal procurement, storage, preparation and service to help provide better options for soldiers. The service must change its existing model and launch efforts forward exponentially so leadership can explore ways to leverage industry partnerships with culinary experts to view the Army’s needs from all perspectives.
The Army is focused on creating a positive seismic shift in food service operations. It’s all about taking care of the warfighter by increasing healthier, more easily accessible food options that are convenient to them.
It’s imperative that the Army gets this right, as it touches not only on readiness but also affects recruiting and retention. Our goal is to ensure that soldiers remain the best-sustained, best-fed and fittest fighting force in the world.
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Lt. Gen. Chris Mohan has been the deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Materiel Command, Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, since December 2022 and the acting commanding general of AMC since March. Previously, he was the commanding general of U.S. Army Sustainment Command. He deployed multiple times in support of operations Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. He was commissioned in 1989 from Appalachian State University, North Carolina, as a Distinguished Military Graduate. He has two master’s degrees: one in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College, and one in military strategy from the U.S. Army War College.