Seapower - August 2009

Afghanistan Reset
Army Materiel Command sees unprecedented cooperation
among services as focus, military resources shift from Iraq

By DAISY R. KHALIFA, Special Correspondent

Resetting the Force

AMC’s mission, in part, involves the repair and refurbishment of equipment — from night-vision goggles, radios and machine guns to High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs or Humvees), tanks and aircraft. Leonard said there is a higher level of coordination among the services than ever before, much of which is reflected in the production output and types of equipment serviced at the AMC repair depots.

“A lot of what we do is, in fact, done for the other services. We reset the Marine Corps’ tanks and small arms for naval services at Anniston [Army Depot, Ala.] and we reset the 500 Humvees for the Marine Corps at Red River [Army Depot, Texas],” said James Dwyer, deputy director for Support Operations at AMC. “We’re much better at the coordination and the interplay among all of the services and the agencies, and the coordination among the services has been extremely successful and much better than it was even under Desert Storm.”

The work ahead for AMC, as well as other defense logistics agencies, is considerable, said Leonard.

“The rough water of magnitude,” he said, describing the volume of equipment used in Operation Iraqi Freedom, includes moving, for example, 120,000-plus containers and 60,000-plus vehicles.

Furthermore, when compared with the military drawdown after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, “We weren’t in an active shooting war with anybody else. The only way to describe it, as we are drawing down, is that things are safer in Iraq but there is a level of hostility that continues,” Leonard said. “And, we’re trying to set conditions for the forces in Afghanistan to succeed in combat operations there.”

As the U.S. military pulls out of Iraq and ramps up operations in Afghanistan, its equipment must be “reset,” which is done in one of the following ways:

■ Equipment undergoes maintenance to make it fully operational once again.

■ It is recapitalized, meaning equipment is not only repaired, but is given new technology developed since that equipment was deployed.

■ New equipment is purchased to replace what was irreparably damaged during combat.

The immense task of simultaneously drawing down troops in Iraq while resetting equip- ment and funneling military resources into Afghanistan has prompted an unprecedented level of coordination and cooperation among all of the services, according to military logisticians.

Senior officials in agencies that deal in Department of Defense logistics — in particular the repair and resetting of costly equipment — are focused on several key time tables, among them the withdrawal of 50,000 personnel from Iraq by 2010, and full withdrawal by 2011, as well as setting conditions for forces in Afghanistan.

“From a historical context, redeployment and drawdown operations within the Department of Defense have been some things that were perhaps planned in the detail with which we plan the assault operations, or the deployment,” said Maj. Gen. Kevin Leonard, Army Material Command’s (AMC’s) deputy chief of staff for operations. “We in Army Materiel Command take very seriously our responsibilities and authorities under Title 10 and support of other services. We make absolutely no distinction — these are Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines who need this equipment in order to prosecute the war in Afghanistan.”