Big Payoff for New Scale

A new scale being tested by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) could end up giv­ing units a lit­tle extra time to train just before rapid deploy­ments in addi­tion to being a big safety boost.
Enough new sys­tems and tech­nolo­gies with bat­tle­field appli­ca­tions are being devel­oped that its pretty easy to dis­miss a new way to weigh vehi­cles as a rel­a­tively low pri­or­ity devel­op­ment (and not all too sexy). But it can mat­ter more than you think.
The lat­est Weigh-​​in-​​Motion scale is meant to improve the process for prepar­ing vehi­cles for air­load, as it auto­mat­i­cally iden­ti­fies the equip­ment, deter­mines the indi­vid­ual axle weights, dis­tance between axles, total vehi­cle weight, pro­file and cen­ter of bal­ance. It sounds bor­ing, but this is the cru­cial data that has to be iden­ti­fied to safely load vehi­cles on cargo planes for trans­port, and any slight change in the way equip­ment is loaded on a vehi­cle means recal­cu­lat­ing every­thing. Since the infor­ma­tion is cur­rently cal­cu­lated in a very low-​​tech man­ner by NCOs and offi­cers with min­i­mal train­ing in how to do so (I used to be one), this step in deployment-​​prep is often done well in advance and the pre­pared vehi­cles (and materiel on them) are then quar­an­tined.
Vehicle quar­an­tines aren’t a big deal for regularly-​​scheduled deploy­ments. But if youve just been given the warn­ing order for a con­tin­gency deploy­ment — at a time when you would oth­er­wise be train­ing — you want to spend as much time prac­tic­ing with your gear as pos­si­ble before you go. That’s not pos­si­ble with quar­an­tined trucks. Instead, you have to spend months try­ing to beg, bor­row and steal vehi­cles and equip­ment to train with, since your stuff is locked up on the flight­line. (A sit­u­a­tion my bat­tal­ion found itself in for a few months in the win­ter of 2002–2003.) A reli­able, sim­pli­fied means of prepar­ing vehi­cles for air­load could some­day insert a lit­tle more flex­i­bil­ity into that time­line and give units a few extra weeks of qual­ity train­ing.
This train­ing is, of course, a pos­si­ble extra ben­e­fit of the new sys­tem. The direct and bank­able ben­e­fit is equip­ment that is pre­pared more accu­rately. Airload plan­ning requires a lot of pre­ci­sion to be done safely, and every extra degree of accu­racy makes the trip that much safer for the air­men and sol­diers shar­ing the plane with the equip­ment. (Possibly avoid­ing, for exam­ple, the June 2002 C-​​130 crash in Afghanistan that was blamed on a load that wasnt prop­erly pre­pared.) ORNL esti­mates that cur­rent means of com­put­ing the data can often be off by 14% or more. The new sys­tem con­sis­tently per­forms with­out any mea­sur­able errors at all.
Theres room for skep­ti­cism, since Oak Ridge has been talk­ing about this for more than 6 years. But its now moved from the lab to test­ing at the Transportation Center at Fort Eustis and rapid deploy­ment posts like Fort Bragg and Fort Drum, so well get to see how it does in action.
– Matthew Tompkins

April 17th, 2006 | Logistics | 31474 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/04/17/big-payoff-for-new-scale/Big+Payoff+for+New+Scale2006-04-17+13%3A59%3A41wonk You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.