COOL GEAR; NOW WHAT?

Getting the gear may have been the easy part. The Army has quickly pushed more than 220 new tech­nolo­gies into the hands of sol­diers in Afghanistan and Iraq — stuff like bomb-​​detection bots and hand­held trans­la­tors.
“But much work remains to be done in the equally impor­tant sec­ond phase offer­ing spare parts, man­u­als and other impor­tant follow-​​on ser­vices, accord­ing to senior offi­cials,” National Defense mag­a­zine says.

The Army was able to pur­chase and deploy these items in rel­a­tively short time by skirt­ing the tra­di­tional pro­cure­ment bureau­cracy and, instead, rely­ing on so-​​called rapid field­ing orga­ni­za­tions.
Many of these new tech­nolo­gies, how­ever, were sent to war in such a hurry that the Army was unable to arrange the sup­port ser­vices usu­ally asso­ci­ated with mil­i­tary sys­tems, such as tech­ni­cal man­u­als and instruc­tions on how to obtain spare parts…
Products get fielded by the REF [Rapid Equipping Force], Brig. Gen. Roger A. Nadeau, com­man­der of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command, said. After a while, sol­diers start ask­ing where are the parts? Where is the log [logis­tics] plan? Collectively, we dont have a good answer.

March 24th, 2005 | Logistics | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.