Seapower - August 2009

■ The maintenance of existing equipment to bring it back to a fully operational capability.

■ The recapitalization of equipment in which it is not only repaired, but is given new technology that has been developed since that equipment was deployed is installed.

■ The purchase of new equipment to replace what was lost during combat.

“The idea is to understand what is coming out when, in a manner sufficient to plan the workload for our sources of repair — be that a depot or a maintenance facility at one of our camps or stations — and then bring that materiel back to the force in a timely manner,” said Leonard.

Dwyer is responsible for reset updates and planning how much materiel is coming out of Iraq, and how best to posture U.S. Army depots to receive the massive influx of goods. Goods and equipment have been flowing into Army depots for reset mainly because of severe wear and tear, most of it having been in theater more than five years and exposed to sand, dust and high temperatures.

Dwyer said much of what he does is “gearing up the depots to take that surge. We are now at three times the workload that we were before the war, and we are three times higher than the materiel we saw in Vietnam,” he said. “Since the beginning of the war, we have reset well over 1 million items in our depots, to include aircraft. Every commodity we have can be repaired at the depots. Last year in our industrial base, we did $6.4 billion in revenue; revenue generated by the repair of hundreds of thousands of items.”

AMC operates five “hard iron depots” across the United States. The Army depots, some dating back to 1944, are commodity-oriented facilities that specialize in resetting the wide variety of equipment deployed today. The depots have a combined work force of about 20,000 Army employees, many of whom are wage-grade mechanics and “wrench turners.”

AMC’s depots include: Anniston, where Army and Marine Corps combat vehicles, tanks, Stryker armored vehicles, artillery and small arms are repaired; Corpus Christi Army Depot in Texas, for the repair of helicopters such as Black Hawks, Apaches and Chinooks; Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsyl-

U.S. MARINE CORPS

U.S. Marines with 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 3, 2d Marine Expeditionary Brigade, drive a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle on Forward Operating Base Dwyer, Afghanistan, June 25.

In Southwest Asia today, AMC has oversight of hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment that it essentially tracks from the theater and back to the agency’s Kuwait- or U.S.-based factory depots, which repair, refurbish and prepare the equipment for use in Afghanistan or future military operations.

Leonard described AMC’s “footprint of force” in Afghanistan, where the agency’s Field Support Brigades ensure that the vast amounts of equipment it has repaired or reset are in place for troops on the ground.

“The timeliness of this is really important,” Leonard said. “Imagine [a commander] arriving at an airfield in Afghanistan. They get acclimated, then one day within a timeline dictated by a maneuver commander, a logistician shows up and takes him to the backside of an airfield and there are 100 MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles], there are machine guns, night-vision goggles, radios — all prepared for that brigade combat team to draw its equipment. We do the same thing for the Marine Expeditionary Force.”

One of AMC’s chief functions involves what happens to equipment when it comes home, at which time the agency looks at the “rolling stock” of all of the weapons and goods and decides how it will be reset.