The Washington Post has a fascinating report from the Anniston Army Depot, where “sprawling lots of tanks and other armored vehicles are just the start of a huge backlog” of gear broken by Iraq and Afghanistan.
“There’s stuff, stuff everywhere,” Joan Gustafson, a depot official, said as she wheeled her brown Chevrolet van through a landscape of rolling hills lined with armadas of mobile guns.
“There’s another field of M1s,” she said, motioning toward a swath of M1A1 Abrams tanks next to the winding road. “We’re just waiting for someone to tell us what to do with them…“
Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.
Despite the work piling up, the Army’s depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding for repairs. In the spring, a funding gap caused Anniston and other depots to lose about a month’s worth of work…
Responding to urgent requests from the Army and Marine Corps, Congress approved an extra $23.8 billion in October to replace worn-out equipment in fiscal 2007. With the money, the Army plans to double the workload at its depots, which will repair and upgrade 130,000 pieces in 2007, up from 63,000 last year. This will include a quadrupling of the number of tanks, Bradleys and other tracked vehicles overhauled, from 1,000 to 4,000.
At Anniston, which will handle 1,800 combat vehicles in fiscal 2007, a cavernous 250,000-square-foot repair shop is humming as damaged tanks are rolled in one by one and disassembled with the help of giant cranes. Removing an M1 tank’s turret alone takes a day and a half, and the entire overhaul requires 54 days and costs about $1 million, said Ted A. Law, the depot’s vehicle manager.
Earnest Linn, 58, a heavy-mobile-equipment mechanic who as of January will have worked at Anniston for 30 years, said that “it’s never been like this” since the end of the Vietnam War.
{ 35 comments… read them below or add one }
I wish we could buy one. Shame all the hulls get cut up.
hmmmm……there no potential customers for outright sales of used equipment/weapons? seems we could recoup some of their cost and get past the rebuilding of them as well……..
Permanently disable/remove the weapons systems if you must, and I will buy a goddamn tank. Oh, yes.
they wont even sell used surplus hmmwvs, which is just stupid. they cut em up into peices, and to even reassemble on is illegal.
crazy. Tom just linked this same article, wondering if Gates will push to more fully fund the USA/USMC/SOF: http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/2006/12/will_gates_fund_the_sysadmin.html
The hmmwvs are no longer cut up.
Well how do you expect to make money repairing things, surely you will make more selling a new M1 then you will replacing its turbine and employing someone to fit it. Who has shares in these companies again? Im sure the stakeholders are making a tidy profit of this little war.
ya know that’s funny. I used to work at Red River until july 06. We had HUNDREDS of good humvees lined up on the roads awaiting shipment. we had a big bill board about how we were 106% to 110% percent of our goals on other vehicles repaired too. I have been cross trained in the 4 different services for mechanical, electronic and weapon syhstems repairs and all I did was ask for an ‘accommodation’. GUESS WHAT! one year later after being shuffled around the base from one meaningless job to another with no accommodation, I gave up and took a disability retirement from civil service. Now I have a merit systems protection board claim against the Army for failing to accommodate a Disabled Veteran and not giving Veteran’s Preference for jobs there or any where else either. And your telling me that we have a lot of broken vehicles cause we are out of money to fix them. Suggest you drive around the perimeter at Red River, then ask the workers, not the managers.
Alton,
Your course of action is clear: find a few others in the same situation as yourself, hire a couple of guys with strong backs out of high school shop classes, and set up an outsourced military vehicle repair corporation. Sit back while dollars roll in.
You want cynical? OK, set up a military vehicle repair _consulting_ corporation and “advise” the DoD on how to repair their vehicles. That is where the really big bucks are being made.
Cranky
When Loring AFB, ME. closed in Northern Maine the wise decision makers set up a Humvee repair business up there to settle some feathers and they transport 3 at a time by tractor trailer over 400 miles just to reach the southern maine stateline. Ane they wonder where the money goes. It is all political. Now they are closing Brunswick NAS with a brand new hangar built for the future replacement for the P3 along with a brand new control tower, taking away the last active duty airfield in the Northeast. Thanks Congress!!
We have outsourced just about everthing overseas. Maybe the “it is too expensive to repair them” is just the lead in to sending the armored vehicles to China, india, eastern Europe. etc. Cutting cost of labor is usually the first step to save money. Better off. Just use illegal aliens, who will work for pennies on the dollar.Look at IT, and tech support. It is cheaper to have aforeign worker at 5$ aweek do the job. Case in point, Dell, Best Buy…….Call me synical! But even when roducts and repairs are done by non US companies, the US companies still take a good profit. Also Mexican Truck drivers, how is that helping US drivers…….
Please refer back to the comment dealing with the great state of Maine. The facility at the old Air Base is the top rated repair facility in the country. They consistantly come in under budget and either early or on time completation of the scheduled work load. The Reason: Their employees. Mostly these are farm kids. They get up, do their chores, go to work, go home, do their chores then just start the cycle over. What we truly need are more of these kids at the other facilities that what to earn an honest days pay for an honest days work.
Sounds like a Bunch of Skepticts out there.. I have NEVER Rebuilt a tank.. or even cut one up… But it seems to me that if we can Rebuild them when they Reach the end of their use period.. The USA can Save a LOT of Money in the long Run… Let the Rebuild Lots Do their Job.. AND Pay them to do that!!!!!!!
We used to have plenty of highly skilled soldiers at our National Guard facility trained in fixing our vehicles. The main problem was getting the parts. Vehicles would sit, little training could take place, and soldiers would get discouraged. I remember when the Army actually hired some Walmart people to share how they were able to keep their supply lines efficient.
Repair or not to repair that is the question!!!
With so many vechicles needing repair and just sitting around it seems logical to get busy making repairs NOW, not later. And why are they still building NEW vehicles while so many sit in need of repair ? It’s not a question of out sourcing or cheap labor, it’s using common sense. Stop or pause the new construction and rebuild, rebuild, and get the equipment back into action.
If the vehicles were driven into storage then it should be no big deal to check them over and estimate what needs to be done. Repair the easiest ones firt and get the whole program rolling like a production line.
It’s time the government stops wasting time and money and starts using common sense and logic. Like Truman said . . . “The buck stops here” well lets start stoping the waste. Dick Killeen
It is much cheaper to have a military technician program, to repair various military equipment, than to contract it out.
We send out soldiers to the various schools to learn to do the maintance, then not have the level of maintance in the failities to do the job.
I was a crew member on the m1a1 abrams tank.We were constantly doing preventive maintenance,and repairs.I am also a mechanic and have done my time in junk yards.What they need to do is take the vehicles that doesn;t need a lot of repairs and fix them first.And figure out which ones are only good for parts.Depending on the amount of damage it maybe quicker to use used parts as to wait for new ones.I would imagine some of the vehicles aren’t good for anything except for parts or recycling.
As a former tank builder, the biggest problem is that all the experienced trained personel for retrofitting and rebuilding these various military vehiciles,who built them new have been laid off permanetly so the fat rich executive’s on the board of directors could make horendus bonuses and salories while outsourceing. Is this what the US tax payer is allowing to happen? I guess we are asleep at the switch!WAKE_UP!!!!
I got back from Iraq in April, I am in a National Guard Inantry unit (Maine), 14 of us were sent to Iraq to augment another Maine National guard unit tasked with force protection. This unit was made of MAINTENENCE from Maine, Iowa and Washington. Only a handfull were turing wrenches. The rest were sitting in towers (whis is what I did), and checked IDs at the DFAC, MWR and Gym. What a great use.
I rememeber during the first Gulf War we didn’t have these problems, We formed a depot outside Damman and fixed anything that came in, biggest problem we had was when a bunch of civs left when the scuds started landing close by, But you know why they cut up the hummers is because of certian parts are not allowed out in the real world, Hope the Dems do not pull funding at Anniston, Red River, and Letterkenny Depot, These vehicles need to get out and sent back so we can win the war,
And so it continues, ” the dumbing down of America”. Call or write your political rep. & lets get this equipment repaired & back to our troops.
the real problem is we dont have enough Military personnel in the field to fix these vehicle. We rely on Civs to repair. Problem , Civs arent welcome in War Zone. Its nuts to send these vehicle out of theater for repairs. God help us if Iranian Revolutionary Guard come swarming across the border to help their Shita brothers.
That is why we will get our ass kicked in a knock down drag out war! We have great toy’s, all the enemy is has to do is hold on for thirty to forty five days our weapons will break down. Since we don’t have the means to fix anything they will roll right over us! But atleast our corporate leaders and wall street our rich!
Why not ask why these vehicles are breaking down so much and so hard to fix in the first place? Do we Log Demo them durring early development or do we wait till near the end of LRIP (Low rate production)? Now look the current developmental programs, will they be better? Will we thoroughly test them to ensure they hold up to real battle field conditions? Will we hold the designers accountable if they do not? Will we invest the money necesary to ensure they are reliable, and maintainable and invest in testing to ensure the equipment is up to snuff? It is hard to make the design more reliable and maintainable after it is fielded. It has to be done during design.
The main reason we have to send all the way back our damaged fighting vehicles from Iraq is that we do not have any allies to host our repair or rehabilitations stations in their soils. We claimed at first that these operational adjecent countries fully supported US efforts in Iraq but the truth is that these fuedal led states are not supported by their own people and they only interest is to isolate these war effort from their peoples. Any workshops and forward repair bases established within their soils will be notified by their own officils to the insurgents groups operating in the vicinity. The insurgents then will blow everything up the sky those heavy machines of war. We have to resort to these expensive and ineffective logistic supply lines due to the war we are slogging in now are in actual facts stupid war.
he point you are missing is that the BRAC in it’s infinite wisdom decided to “scale” back Red River Army Depot in Texarkana and turn over all rebuilds to civilain companies. When this Depot was run by the Army, their turnaround time for all sizes and types of vehicles was fantastic. BRAC decided everything would be done at Anniston and guess what, they cannot keep up. Let’s see, we cut the military to the bone, then we close the depots that do great work, overload the others, and then we can’t figure out why we don’t have what we need to fight a war. Looks like the “Peace Initiative” did not work out as expected.
In reading these comments, the wonderful grammar aside, does anyone remember anything about “transformation?” Many of the units that owned these tanks now walk or ride in Strykers. This depot is now the “home for misfit toys.”
Totally agree with the BRAC statement.
The reason why all the broken machines are broken is due to the 10 years of draw down and peace dividend used to fund the 1992-1999 President legacy. The build up used all of the funds since 2000 to upgrade the forces and train those that are fighting now. War is ugly and to outsource repairing these systems is criminal, not just Politically correct.
i think red river army depot is agreat place to work. What I have a problem with is that we have professional people there that know what they are doing and build a better product and also produce it on time with less people and time and less shifts UNLIKE BAE SYSTEMS in which the GOV. or MANAGEMENT at Red River who is giving all the Bradley overhauls to.
These could be related:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7W5SOI7Z7U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSR42mAuq9E
Earnest Linn, 58, a heavy-mobile-equipment mechanic who as of January will have worked at Anniston for 30 years, said that “it’s never been like this” since the end of the Vietnam War.
Sure it’s never been like this what do you expected that these people will welcome you?
1500 M-1 Abrams tanks destroyed in Iraq! If the present administration wanted to sabotage our armed forces, weaken our national defense, and move us, as a nation, closer to bankruptcy and collapse, they couldn’t have done a better job.
We have great military people and great workers, but we sure need better national leadership.
Is the “former” Soviet Union making war against us by their Arab/Iraqi/Iranian proxies?
sturdley
That many tanks weren’t destroyed. All the vehicles that come back from theatre have to be remanufactured. Geez.
Life was so much better back in the good old days, before the war. We had all our tanks in one piece and were enjoying “peace”. All we had to do was look the other way while the UN’s pointless sanctions killed over 500,000 children in Iraq.
Ah, the glory days. It may have been bought at the cost of murdering vast numbers of children, but at least we didn’t have to fix any tanks.
My son just got out of the USMC. He was an Abrams Tank mech. How would he go about getting a job at Anniston. If that is possible? Suggestions?