Brigade Combat Team Sustainment

Army,  Mar 2006  by McIlhargey, David

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

"Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

When Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. spoke these words years ago, he had no idea how pertinent they would be today. The Program Manager Future Combat Systems Brigade Combat Team/Lead System Integrator has undertaken the challenging and rewarding mission of transforming the Army's Future Combat Systems Brigade Combat Team into the future fighting force.

Using performance-based logistics, the Army's FCS Brigade Combat Team is able to apply government and industry best practices and contracting methodology that brings a new sustainment concept to reality. The FCS team is experienced in the integration of processes, technologies and concepts required for the Army to make the transition into the future using performance-based logistics, which allow the warfighter to contract for complete support of a platform using long-term contracts built around metrics that meet predetermined requirements. This new relationship allows government and industry to partner for the best possible outcomes, capitalizing on each partner's core competencies. By forming such partnerships and using performance-based agreements, the warfighter has a contracting method that encourages continuous improvement, risk sharing and the combination of government and industry best practices. Using formal methodologies that include the business case analysis, core logistics analysis and source of repair analysis, the FCS team is able to optimize the support solution.

By creating a cascading hierarchy of contracts built around performance as it pertains to individual circumstances, the warfighter assures delivery of requirements, including reduction of logistical footprint and optimization of supply distribution. This allows the product support integrator to concentrate on overseeing the planning for gaining efficiencies at every point within the supply chain. Asset visibility allows supply chain professionals to flag critical supply points within the chain and influence the supply needs for a theater without creating an iron mountain of parts. These points include production, distribution, inventory management and repair, among others. Often the production piece of the supply chain is misunderstood; the ability to create a reliable piece of equipment starts on the engineer's table. If items have reliability improvements and are built around design influences, the supply chain becomes more efficient. Past contracting methods did not provide industry with incentives to create more reliable equipment. The FCS One Team is ready to build more reliable equipment to reduce or eliminate the need for replacement parts or frequent service. The performance-based contract is built around a higher level of sustainment, inclusive of parts and service. Highlevel metrics built around increasing availability create business practices that make it in the best interests of industry to use processes that reduce costs through efficiencies built around redundancy, commonality and modularity.

Within the FCS Brigade Combat Team, sustainment will be an operation directed by the maneuver force commander and coordinated by the battle staff-not as an administrative or logistics function. Distribution-centric sustainment that is fully integrated into the operational maneuver process using a logistics common operating picture allows user-friendly tracking of equipment and resources by commanders and logisticians alike. Allowing logisticians to view an FCS Brigade Combat Team on a computer screen and drill through a color-coded representation of equipment that is not at 100 percent availability, the logistician can not only see what is causing the issue, but also how to solve the problem with options built around different courses of action. The future of logistics is built around planning, strategizing, implementing and monitoring. It is not enough to detect a problem in today's Army; information must be available to predict the problem and push parts and services forward to resolve issues before they happen. This is accomplished by using predictive maintenance logistics, prognostics and anticipatory diagnostics. If the issue cannot be resolved easily and is repetitive, it becomes a candidate for reengineering. Intelligent systems agents crunch numbers and give solutions instead of just giving data for analysis. After solutions are determined, the action needed can, in many cases, be automated once the system is proven and established. For example, the Army may have an infantry carrier vehicle in the field of action that communicates a warning message to the operator and the logistician explaining that the operator is not using the piece of equipment correctly, creating harsh conditions on interior parts. This sensoring with automatic identification technologies allows total visibility in real time so that supply chain efforts can be continually improved over time. By filtering these sensoring messages depending on conditions and business rules, a tailored interface can be established depending on the scenario. Although the FCS Brigade Combat Team concept is built around the network, even new pieces of equipment with little history can have predictive analysis that is accurate when built around labtested engineering failures.