A new Army study of its armored vehicle industrial base focuses on the “minimum sustaining rate” as a way to both protect vendors and keep costs down for the military, and the study’s results have already begun altering the way the Army will procure components, with leaders deciding to buy engines for the BAE Systems-built Paladin Integrated Management (PIM) vehicle ahead of schedule.
Speaking at a press briefing at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exposition on Oct. 23, Col. Bill Sheehy, program manager for the Armored Brigade Combat Team, said that the Army will leverage the data in the report to ensure it doesn’t overpay for parts simply because of the timing of its purchases. A preliminary copy of the report, formally called the “M1 Abrams Tank Upgrade and Bradley Fighting Vehicle Industrial Base Study,” was submitted to Congress in July, and the Army expects to submit the final report in December. Despite its name, the study looked at the entire fleet of ground combat systems, including the Stryker family of vehicles, M113 family of vehicles, Ground Combat Vehicle, Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle and more, Army spokeswoman Ashley Givens said.
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| BAE System’s Paladin Integrated Management vehicle will be among the first programs to see its acquisition strategy altered by the Army’s industrial base report, which recommended front-loading the buys of the PIM’s engines. Photo courtesy BAE Systems. |
“Probably the most obvious near-term change that we’ve made as a result of that study had to do with the way in which we’re going to buy the engines on the Paladin PIM vehicle,” Sheehy said. “We were able to get approval to front-load, to buy in advance some number of those engines so that we’re loading Cummins at a rate that allows them to produce that engine economically. And then the study went in and dug into the numbers on the pricing from the sub-tier suppliers and other things to tell us, okay, if you buy slower than that, what’s the impact?”
In conducting the study, teams did on-site evaluations with vendors at all tiers in the supply chain, evaluating which companies were sole providers of a good, which companies were at risk of leaving the supply chain, which capabilities would take the most time or money to reconstitute if lost, and so on.
“In some cases we’ve been able to identify specific key components that, for example, the re-engineering costs would be very high if we had to replace that component,” he said, so the Army would do what it could to ensure those vendors don’t leave the market. “And then what actions can we take to make sure that vendor is producing at a sufficiently economic rate to satisfy our programs now and in the future?”
Brig. Gen. David Bassett, program executive officer for ground combat systems, said during the same event that the study wouldn’t come to any sweeping conclusions, but rather it provides a lot of good raw data and analysis “that really should help us identify where the areas are in the industrial base that are at the most critical risk and the Army should consider applying resources to sustain.”