Modernization takes on new forms and meaning at TACOM

Terry Gerton I want to talk a little bit about TACOM and stage-set by saying I was a maintenance company commander in Germany when the Army fielded M1s and Bradleys, and the Army is still fighting with M1s and Bradleys today. What kind of challenges does that put at the feet of the TACOM commander?

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn Well, we’re maintaining a legacy field that’s been, in some cases, rode hard and put up wet. And so determining what the most consequential investments are for maintaining that fleet as we anticipate modernization efforts in the future. You know, we have a mixed fleet right now of some modernized brigades with an M1A2 SEPv3; others still have the M1A2 SEPv2. So managing the supply chains for an aging and varied fleet has its challenges. I’m very proud of the collaboration we have with the program offices and with our Ground Vehicle Support Center all right there at the Detroit Arsenal, where we can work through that collectively. If the program office has an engineering change proposal and that has to get through GVSC and then back to our weapon system teams, we’ve got all the right people in all the places to work through that collectively. And so the synergy on Detroit Arsenal from all of the entities that are involved in ground system acquisition support and sustainment, that’s really strong. And so in the face of having to sustain aging and varied fleets, I’m grateful that we’ve got that synergy across our different entities.

Terry Gerton Well there are so many systems that go into that and tank and automotive. So you’ve got all of the wheeled vehicles, all of the tracked vehicles. There’s technology and fire control and weapons.

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn And tank-automotive and armaments, right? So that TACOM actually has two A’s in it. So, yeah, and we have just done some reorganization internal to TACOM within our Integrated Logistics Support Center, which is really the heartbeat of our operational support. We’ve reorganized ourselves to be better aligned to the PAE structure. The Army is driving off of the portfolio acquisition executive structure, and so to to best be positioned to support that we did some internal reorganization so that I have a sustainment enabler as part of each of the PAEs, and that is the TACOM representative in the room providing a sustainment perspective through the complete lifecycle. One of the things that I am optimistic about with acquisition reform is that sustainment will be part of the discussion at the table from the beginning, during the acquisition process and all the way through. And as you probably know from your previous experience, the sustainment has sometimes been an afterthought. Even in some cases, I think, an inconvenience, an inconvenient fact that what we’re acquiring will ultimately have to be sustained. And so now that the PAEs are being challenged to look holistically at all of the equipment within their portfolios and look not just at acquisition and modernization, but also sustainment, and so we’ve reorganized to better be a part of that discussion in support of the PAEs.

Terry Gerton Are you seeing a change in the conversations happening around the acquisition table already when it comes to sustainment of perhaps modern systems?

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn I am. And so, I’ll give you an example. The PM Abrams, you know, our neighbors right there working on M1E3 XM30 program office is right around the corner from my office. And so, in all of their acquisition efforts, we have representatives that are in the room when they’re doing a soldier touch point; we have TACOM teammates who are there providing the sustainability assessments that I just think in the past have come later in the lifecycle. And so I’m optimistic, again, about sustainment being more included, more central, earlier on.

Terry Gerton Well, the big part of sustainment is supply chain, and you mentioned that early on. How are you dealing with supply chains for these, let’s just say, long-lived pieces of equipment?

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn We have challenges with obsolescence for our aging fleets that in many cases transition to sustainment, but have not had resources for overhauls. When we go to actually run those through a depot line or even to sustain them out in the fleet, you know, high-mix, low-volume, we find that the sub-tier suppliers for a lot of the OEMs have moved on when they are not seeing a return on investment for them to continue to produce a particular part. So we’ve got significant back-order issues driven by obsolescence, vendor under-performance, sub-tier suppliers leaving the market. How we’re dealing with that is trying to open the aperture for additional sources of supply, and advanced manufacturing is one of the tools in that arsenal, one that we’re investing in to take full advantage of that capability. We’re not going to advance manufacture our way out of our supply chain challenges in whole. We need a whole bunch of things to go into that. We need additional investment and we need to broaden the base of suppliers. But there are certainly cases where advanced manufacturing holds tremendous promise for addressing some of our issues with obsolescence or production of parts closer to the point of need.

Terry Gerton Well, tell me a little bit more about how that advanced manufacturing, especially forward, is changing maintenance strategy, maintenance doctrine.

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn Yeah, so my teammates at CASCOM, the Sustainment Center of Excellence, are working right now on a new maintenance concept that recognizes that the way we’ve done maintenance in the past is not feasible in the operational environment where there’s a transparent battlefield and where if you can be seen, you can targeted, and if you could be targeted, you can be destroyed. And so we can’t have big unit maintenance collection points forward inside the weapons engagement zone, or we’ll certainly lose whatever we put there. So we got to have distributed capability, we have to make determinations on what we’re going to try to fix forward versus what we need to just immediately evac to position further back in the battlefield geometry. I think where advanced manufacturing comes into that is the most important thing is to get a system back into the fight as quickly as possible. We have the most capable ground equipment of any army in the world. It’s the envy of every other nation, as it should be. We have the best engineers and we have best production facilities. And so unfortunately, that incredibly capable equipment can be sidelined by a broken bracket or a bolt or a knob. And some of those items are more exquisite and complex; some are quick fixes, but our supply chain is not responsive to that. So that’s where I really see forward manufacturing being able to regenerate combat power at the point of need — if we have a mobile 3D-printing capability in our tactical formations, light, nimble, mobile as I mentioned, and able to produce that quick battle damage repair and get that platform back into the fight. And then if you go an echelon back from there, what in the division support area, what in the core theater support area, what capabilities should we have to produce higher-level parts that can address some of those supply chain challenges? Now, can we produce those closer to where they’re needed in a forward theater?

Terry Gerton Is that changing the role, then, of the depots and arsenals in the rear?

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn I don’t think that it’s mutually exclusive at all. Our depots and arsenals are going to continue to be that sustainment level, higher-level maintenance where you need to tear a platform back down to its core to really restore it to being that incredibly capable ground equipment that is the envy of the world. That work is best done in a depot setting where you’ve got all the right special tools, overhead lift and trained artisans. But there is the work that can be done by unit maintainers or forward-repair activities to return a piece of equipment that’s been damaged or just sustained a wear-or-tear fault that doesn’t need to go all the way back to the depot. You know, when you look at the modeling associated with large-scale combat operations, we are going to have to be able to get equipment back into the fight faster, particularly if we’re talking about in our pacing theater in INDOPACOM. It’s a long way from the Pacific to Anniston, Alabama. So if we need to quickly turn Stryker vehicles back into the fight, having the ability to do some level of forward repair, I think, is essential. And so we’re certainly exploring that.

Terry Gerton So what are the biggest modernization challenges on your plate?

Brig. Gen. Beth Behn It’s modernization in two different buckets. Modernizing our organic industrial base — I am incredibly proud of the number of opportunities I’ve had in the last year to go and do ribbon-cuttings for new areas within our OIB sites. Paint booths that are fully automated, a new welding facility at Anniston, Alabama that allows the hull of a tank to be 360-degree rotated to do the welding work on it. So we’re going to get better quality work, better capability for our welders, faster production. I think one of my misunderstandings about OIB modernization as I came into TACOM over a year ago was that it was really focused on just facility improvements. And what I’ve come to understand is that those facility improvements are all tied to production. So it’s not just a new building; it is a new building that allows you to consolidate. At Anniston, we just were resourced this past year for a component remanufacturing facility that’s going to allow work for 19 different platforms happening in 19 different places across the depot to be consolidated into a single building. So the efficiencies, the agility that that gives to the Anniston commander is really, it’s a game changer in terms of production capability. We opened a new access control point at Waterfleet Arsenal in New York. And so, my first thought was, oh wow, we built a new gate, But, that gate allows commercial traffic to move in and out at a much faster pace, much more fluid flow. And so that’s materiel coming into the arsenal for production, that’s completed product going out. The shipping delays that were just associated with an access control point were significant, so it’s an infrastructure project that’s also leading to better production. Each of our OIB modernization efforts is linked to a vision of the arsenals and depots being better connected through software to be able to see their production, to make data-driven decisions on production, rather than sort of intuition or some sort of analog calculation. So, very proud of the work that we’re doing there. In terms of modernization of the fleets that we support, again, the thing that I’m most optimistic about is the way our sustainment teams are integrated with the program offices that are acquiring the modernized fleet. And having the opportunity to help design for sustainability, not just design for the effectiveness of the platform system, which they’re still doing, but also how well are we going to be able to sustain that system as it ages in its fifth year, in its 10th year? Do we have the supply chain in place? Do we the full tech data, the drawings, so that if we get to a point where we are facing a vendor disruption, we’re able to advance manufacture or find an alternate supply source? I think there’s goodness on the horizon in terms of designing for sustainability with some of our modernized systems.