WASHINGTON — With the US Army in the midst of a vast modernization, Army Materiel Command is “setting conditions” this fiscal year to implement its own plan to revamp its facilities across the United States starting in fiscal 2024.
Army Materiel Command manages and operates the service’s organic industrial base, composed of 23 depots, arsenals and ammunition plants. Earlier this year, AMC briefed senior leaders and lawmakers on its 15-year, $16 billion plan to update the command’s decades-old facilities to prepare for the Army’s future systems. The plan begins in FY24, which begins Oct. 1, 2023.
“The next 12 months for us is all about setting conditions,” said Col. Rich Martin, director of AMC’s Organic Industrial Base (OIB) Modernization Task Force, during an interview with Breaking Defense at the annual Association of the United States Army conference last week.
The three phases are: modernizing the immediate processes and capabilities of the organic industrial base, expanding and securing those capabilities, and then maintaining and sustaining them. Each phase lasts five years.
Martin said that as part of AMC’s preparation to kickstart its plan, it’s currently working through its second Program Objective Memorandum process to determine how resources will be doled out to facilities. He said that for the rest of the year the task force will be evaluating and adjusting spending as needs change, be it due to economic factors like inflation or global events such as the invasion of Ukraine.
Related: With new systems on the horizon, one Army depot plans its own modernization
A tricky aspect of the modernization plan for AMC will be balancing spending on upgrades with facilities’ daily maintenance, sustainment and production operations. As AMC moves ahead with its plan for modernization the 23 facilities, a key piece of its plan is annually revisiting objectives to adjust schedules and spending as needed, to meet changing conditions.
“We need to go through and look at: Are the systems going to be fielded on the schedule we have? Is the Army phasing out a system that we have previously planned to do? And so it’s important to not just set projects, but go back and challenge all of the assumptions on an annual basis,” said Marion Whicker, AMC’s executive deputy to the commanding general. “Because what we want to make sure is that we make the best investment in our facilities for the things we need today, as well as the things we’re going to do tomorrow.”
For example, the US inflation rate is currently sitting above 8 percent, meaning costs on many products the Army buys are increasing. Martin said that this has led to cost escalation with construction projects and “we’ve got to go back and figure that out.”
Competition For Resources
In August, Breaking Defense traveled to Letterkenny Army Depot, Pa., one of the targets for expansive modernization. As the depot focused on air and missile defense systems, as well as long-range fires, the depot had a $1.4 billion plan to upgrade its facilities, equipment and workforce for the Army’s new generation of air defense and fires platforms.
But the challenge for Letterkenny and the other 22 facilities is competition for finite resources. To tackle that, AMC invested in a decision support tool to help the service prioritize what investments should be made. According to Whicker, the facilities can input their projects and corresponding details into the tool, which can then provide leaders with insights to guide investment decisions.
“We’re able to look across the 15-year period at the impacts of funding decisions in ’24 [and] how they could potentially, from a ripple down perspective, impact later years,” Whicker said.
With the service working through 35 signature modernization priorities, it’s possible that programs will be delayed and those effects will trickle down over time.
“You want to make sure you’re spending it on the right things — that what we looked at last year when we wrote the plan, does it still hold true?,” Whicker said. “That’s a very first question you should ask. Are those systems still on schedule? And have any of our assumptions change?”
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