Adopting a Warfighting Culture With a Business Discipline

Army, Oct 2008 by Dunwoody, Ann E

We are examining the integration of life-cycle sustainment strategies across the logistics enterprise. This ensures programming not only of procurement costs, but also of sustainment costs to account for what we call the "fully burdened cost." Approximately 60 percent of total life-cycle costs occur after the development and production phases for weapons systems. Over the last decade, the Army has become increasingly reliant on performance-based logistics agreements and contractor logistics support. While these sustainment strategies have optimized the sustainment of specific weapons systems, in some cases they have also increased the complexity of the sustainment footprint within the BCTs. This, combined with the new technical sophistication of our systems, requires us to have an enterprise view of the total life cycle of equipment.

We are working to synchronize depot production with AEFORGEN. Synchronized production ensures sufficient mission-ready equipment and weapons systems to support combat deployment requirement training and timelines. A 360-degree enterprise view is critical to ensure that the Army has visibility of all the available maintenance capacity to leverage responsive fieldand depot-level reset. In turn, this will ensure that the Army is utilizing available maintenance capacity more efficiently, potentially with better cost control. The Army's reset program is the process that makes our equipment ready for redistribution across the entire supply chain.

We are aggressively working to restore strategic depth in our CSS formations. Balancing our CSS forces and reconfiguring our Army prepositioned stocks (APS) are critical to ARFORGEN and enable greater flexibility and mobility. Enterprise processes and systems are being developed across the active and reserve components to optimize ARFORGEN. Modular transformation, combined with the use of the reserve components as an operational force, allows us to better manage our CSS units. The Army's reserve components are essential in this process. Seventyone percent of all CSS units are in reserve components.

We are also restoring our APS, which are vital to the Army's strategic flexibility in meeting global requirements and the national military strategy. We have transformed the APS and equipment to support modular forces. Our APS are now configured with heavy BCTs and infantry BCTs. Our operational sustainment stocks, consisting of repair parts and other essential equipment, are configured to provide seamless support and maximum flexibility.

As we focus our efforts to restore balance in our Army through the four strategic imperatives of sustain, prepare, reset and transform, we are also looking at logistical processes through an enterprise lens. The unprecedented benefits we see and realize from working, learning and thinking together will accelerate our ability to sustain, prepare, reset and transform our Army. In this way, we will not turn the Army into a business but will understand the business of our Army.