Last year, a small cadre of Army maintenance specialists was dispatched from the service's depot in Corpus Christi, Texas, to perform a complex repair on a CH-47 Chinook helicopter based in South Korea. The work took 13 days, rather than the 220 estimated to ship it back to the U.S. for repairs. The savings: An estimated $2 million.

That's according to Lt. Gen. Christopher Mohan, acting commander of Army Materiel Command. Speaking Oct. 16 on a panel on the organic industrial base at the Association of the U.S. Army's Annual Meeting and Exposition, Mohan and other leaders said operations like that represent a future they want to move the service toward, one in which capabilities to get gear back in the fight are pushed forward to operational locations, minimizing downtime and disruption. 

Mohan said the Army's “surge capacity” represented by the aging organic industrial base, consisting of depots and production facilities around the country, was now the focus of a 15-year, $18 billion update and modernization process that would shore up old water and sewer lines and structures and build in modern manufacturing capabilities and cyber protection.

“We’re also updating and addressing our workforce to make sure that we have the necessary workforce for the future that will drive our capability into the future, the next generation," he said.

Future capability, according to Maj. Gen. Michael Lalor, commanding general of Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, will involve posturing the organic industrial base to “repair forward,” setting the Army up for a new era of warfighting.

“During the 20 years of warfare we had prior to this new era of ongoing era of crisis and competition here that we’re working through, a lot of the capabilities at the national level were moved back to [continental United States]-based,” Lalor said. “Now it’s time to rethink them and re-push them out and make sure that we have the capabilities forward to support those units in the field."

The Army is making progress on this goal. In recent months, he said, an average of 60 teams ranging in size from two to 12 people have been conducting maintenance missions forward on any given day. Another component of the change, Lalor said, was giving on-site maintainers and in-house experts the permissions they need to do repairs on their own. 

"We're moving our authorities forward—allowing units, if they can show and demonstrate they've got the capabilities, the tools and training, and we can certify that, we'll give you the repair authority forward," Lalor said.

Maj. Gen. Ronald Ragin, commanding general of the 21st Theater and Sustainment Command supporting U.S. Army Europe and Africa, emphasized that the priority mission of supporting Ukraine in its existential fight against an invading Russia, was driving the pace of modernization, from integrating advanced manufacturing and other technologies to moving capabilities forward to get them back in the fight faster. 

"Emerging technologies already visible on the battlefields in Ukraine are rapidly changing the character of war," he said. "Innovations and investments that we fail to make today will be adaptations that we'll be forced to make under fire, and the price will be paid in coalition life losses."

— Hope Hodge Seck for AUSA