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A worker at Tobyhanna Army Depot installs wiring on an Army satellite terminal.

WASHINGTON: From new contract structures to robotic safety tools, Army Materiel Command is working on an ambitious master plan to modernize its arsenals, depots, and ammunition plants. That means everything from new contract structures to robotics. But, AMC commander Gen. Ed Daly assured me — and, indirectly, the congressional Depot Caucus — the objective is to retrain the workforce, not reduce it.

[Click here to read Part 1 of our exclusive interview with Gen. Daly, on 3D printing and data]

For years, employees across what the Army calls its Organic Industrial Base (OIB) have had to make do with aging facilities, obsolete technology and, in some cases, serious hazards. In 2017, 55-year-old Lawrence Bass was scooping up explosive ingredients with a wooden spatula when they exploded, killing him and shutting down the Lake City ammunition plant for months.

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Gen. Ed Daly

For years, Army Materiel Command has spread its limited modernization funding more or less evenly across its dozens of facilities, giving each of them enough for marginal, incremental improvements but never enough for a true top-to-bottom overhaul. The new modernization plan, Daly said, is meant to change that by prioritizing some facilities for higher funding – which means, in a “zero-sum” budget, that others will get less.

“If we do this correctly, we could do it as a zero sum,” Daly told me. “We don’t necessarily have to pay more money. All we have to do is invest… based on prioritization,” he explained, “as opposed to, ‘let’s just spread money across the OIB and give everybody a little bit so everybody can make some upgrades.’ That’s just not going to work for the future.

“There’s going to be winners and losers in this,” he said frankly. “For example, I’m less concerned about bringing our storage facilities in several locations to a 21st century capability. I’m more concerned about the production facility for, as an example … 30,000-pound bombs.”

Another high-priority facility is the ammunition plant at Lake City, Mo., now operated by contractor Olin Winchester, which produces 5.56 mm ammunition for M4 carbines and 7.62 mm for machine guns. “We know we’re going to need the 6.8 millimeter ammunition for the future for the Next Generation Squad Weapon,” Daly said. But instead of just adding one more ammo manufacturing line alongside those already at Lake City, he said, “why don’t we look at a brand-new facility… a multi-caliber production facility that has state-of-the-art layouts and systems and technology?”

Daly wants to base these hard decisions on in-depth analysis, which he said will likely take a year to do.

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A worker at Anniston Depot repairs the oil cooler from an M1 Abrams main battle tank.

Data Before Decisions

“I have the depot, arsenal, and ammunition plant commanders …getting with their Life Cycle Management Command headquarters… that’s Tank-Automotive Command, Communication-Electronics Command, or Aviation & Missile Command… and developing new master plans that have detailed fidelity on the projects that we want to go after,” he said. “Then we can figure out which ones we fund.”

One model for how to do this might be the comprehensive database of infrastructure needs at Army bases. “We went out to every post camp and station and every organization that’s out in the United States Army,” Daly recounted. “Now, we have a data repository… It’s called the Facilities Investment Program.”

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Army Reserve technicians prepare fiber optic cable for installation on Fort Hood.

“If you said to me, ‘Fort Hood….how many barracks do they need to be upgraded?’, I could tell you that,” Daly said. “And if you said to me, ‘How much money do they need on their airfield to bring it to standard,’ I could tell you that.”

“We know that to a level of detail that we never had before,” he said, “and we can use data analytics to refine our facilities investment plan.”

How long will it take to do a similarly detailed plan for AMC’s arsenals, plants, and depots? “We’re going to have to go back and relook at all of our Master plans over the next year, [so] it will take the better part of a year at best,” Daly told me.

“There may be a couple of things we’re able to lay into 23-27 POM,” he said. That’s the Army’s long-term budget plan, or Program Objective Memorandum, for fiscal years 2023-2027, which will be written in 2021. But the big changes will probably have to wait for the 2024-2028 budget plan, which will be written in 2022.

And it doesn’t stop there, he noted: “We’ll review it annually to see else we need to add.”

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A worker at Tobyhanna Army Depot sandblasts a satellite terminal.

The overall philosophy, Daly told me, is to replace industrial-age, narrowly specialized production lines with more adaptable, multi-purpose facilities that rely on computers and robotics. The new technology and techniques will also require a new division of responsibility between the government and its contractors, especially at so-called Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated (GOCO) facilities like Lake City.

“Quite, frankly I think we’ve put an obstacle in place where we have intentionally separated GOCOs and GOGOs [Government-Owned, Government-Operated],” Daly said. “I think that’s been a wrong approach.”

The current contract structures work okay for incremental tweaks to aging facilities, but not for the top-to-bottom overhaul that’s required. “I firmly believe that we have not, in many cases, held the contractors accountable for getting us to this 21st century investment approach,” Daly said. “Every contract has to be looked at through a different lens now going forward.”

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Army Materiel Command HQ at Redstone Arsenal, Ala.

At the same time Army Materiel Command adds a bigger emphasis on modernization to its contracts, however, it also wants to take some things out, so the contractors can focus on their primary mission, making military equipment, and not on vital but ancillary services like power generation and firefighting, which AMC should handle in-house.

“We’ve put too much into those contracts,” Daly told me. “We’ve got to figure out a way to get those companies focused specifically on manufacturing… and then take those other ancillary [or] burdening services and give them to Army Materiel Command until we can drive the cost down.

“Some of the easier ones, I think, to cut out of those contracts are fire and emergency services, as an example,” he said. “When we get into environmental [issues], we’ve got to be very, very careful, for example at Radford or Holston, because we want to make sure that we hold the contractor accountable for how we are disposing of material” that might be toxic, flammable, or polluting.

One thing Daly absolutely does not want to cut out: his people. “This transition to a 21st century approach is not code for reducing the workforce,” he promised. “It is really an initiative that allows us to realign the workforce to the appropriate skills…. It’s giving the opportunity for training and education so that they can thrive in this new environment.”

“Maybe it’s less people that are working in direct contact with munitions, and now they’re working on supporting the robotics effort,” he said, with remote-controlled machines handling dangerous materials instead of human beings with wooden paddles.

That’s the kind of change that could save lives.