The Army is looking to reduce its reliance on contractor-provided sustainment so it can shrink its logistic tail and deploy more quickly to trouble spots, two service officials said Oct. 3.
Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said soldiers should be able to set up and maintain their own equipment in the field, reducing the need for industry field service representatives. The ability of soldiers to do that work on their own needs to be “inherent in the design” of that equipment.
“We have to step away from the field service rep,” said Ashley, who spoke on a modernization panel at an Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, D.C. “The soldier has to be able to put the system into employment.”
Another panelist, Gen. Gustave Perna, the new head of U.S. Army Materiel Command, gave a similar assessment.
“If it cannot be trained and learned and maintained by a soldier, then it’s probably not something we want on the battlefield,” Perna said. “We really need to start thinking about that in great depth.”
Lightening the weight of the equipment soldiers must carry, reducing the number of large transport aircraft they need and cutting the amount of fuel they consume are also priorities for Perna, who took the helm of his command a few days ago. If those changes are implemented, “we could save ourselves a lot of time and effort and ensure the expeditionary Army that we need,” he said. “As we lighten the loads, we lighten the requirements, it takes less infrastructure and less capability to get us there.”
After 15 years of fighting insurgencies in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the Army is increasingly focusing on potential conflicts with near-peer competitors. But predicting where those conflicts may arise is difficult, leading to the desire for a lighter, more flexible force.