Army Secretary John McHugh told lawmakers the service is keeping an eye on the industrial base during dips in weapons work, pointing to the imminent release of a long-awaited report on ground-vehicle companies.
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) quizzed McHugh during his service’s annual posture hearing on it budget proposal about how it is managing the risk to the industrial base as it proposes to reduce weapon system quantities and delay equipment maintenance.
“What criteria or indications of the industrial base are you going to monitor, Mr. Secretary, to alert you to…the imminent loss of capability or capacity to meet the Army’s needs in the future,” Levin asked. “In other words, what’s going to indicate some evidence of unacceptable increase in that risk or an imminent loss of capacity or capability in the future?”
The Army has started an analysis of its industrial base, “similar” to the Pentagon-wide Sector-by-Sector, Tier-by-Tier analysis (S2T2) of the defense industry, McHugh said. Tied to that, a study of the Army’s ground vehicles being conducted by industrial analysis firm A.T. Kearney is expected “hopefully in June,” he added.
The study will look “in particular (at) our combat-vehicle fleet, to make sure that we understand where the threats lie to our industrial base, particularly if we’re going to have single-point failures,” McHugh told the SASC.
Service leaders announced the study last year, as some lawmakers pushed for the Army to do more to modernize vehicles such as Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. Prime contractors also warned of smaller suppliers being strained because the service does not have any new big vehicle production programs starting soon.
McHugh said the current risk the Army’s industrial base is facing is “an area that troubles us deeply.”
He pointed to both contracting defense budgets and the changing weapons needs for the Army as it comes out of two theaters of war as major culprits.
McHugh said in addition to the Army-specific studies he also has worked with Pentagon leaders on the S2T2 analysis, an across-the-board look at all military suppliers to identify metrics to measure risk. The Pentagon is now trying to set up metrics that the Army can use to identify “red flags that will provide us at least the opportunity to try to do something about it,” McHugh said.
“The first step is going where the problems lie,” he added. “The second is trying to use diminishing resources to protect it.”