As the Army looks to the future, the coming decades are likely to be ones of persistent conflict—protracted confrontation among state, non-state and individual actors who use violence to achieve their political and ideological ends. In this era, the Army will continue to have a central, enduring role in implementing the National Security Strategy, resulting in high demand for Army forces and capabilities. The Army’s senior leadership, responding to this strategic environment and the National Security Strategy that flows from it, is building an expeditionary- and campaignquality force capable of deploying rapidly into any operational environment, conducting operations with modular forces anywhere in the world and sustaining operations as long as necessary to accomplish the mission.

In this uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, the Army’s expeditionary capability relies heavily on prepositioned equipment and materiel, ready for issue to Soldiers. The Army Prepositioned Stocks (APS) program supports the National Military Strategy by strategically prepositioning vital war stocks afloat and ashore worldwide, thereby reducing the deployment response times of the modular, expeditionary Army. With the National Defense Strategy dictating a greater proportion of troops home-based in the United States, APS abroad and afloat are indispensable to America’s global force-projection capability.

The requirement for APS is compelling. Resetting equipment for future deployments and other contingencies and transforming the force to improve the Army’s ability to meet the needs of the combatant commanders are imperatives for mitigating near-term risk. Equally pressing is the need for substantially rebuilding APS, which has been heavily employed and depleted over the past five years. Balancing risk and affordability is key to implementing a successful APS strategy. In an era of high cost, limited resources and competing requirements, full funding of APS must not be overlooked.