Defense logistics agency issue - KMI Media Group

in USTRANSCOM through Karachi and then upward through two
main ground routes through Pakistan into Afghanistan.
As a logistician, I’ve watched that movement from several different
jobs that I’ve held over the last five or six years. If you had
asked me prior to November 2011, what do you think about that,
I would have said well, that’s the way we do things. It’s almost an
assumption that we’ll move on the ground because of the access
and the distance in a landlocked country and all the operational
impact. When it closed, there was a little bit of a concern on the
part of DLA about how we would provide sustainment inside a
landlocked country, knowing that we’d been heavily dependent on
that Pakistan ground line of communication.
Fortunately, in about 2008, USTRANSCOM and Central Command
decided they needed another entrance, and the northern
distribution network was established. Frankly speaking, our dependence
on the PAKGLOC was really on my mind. As it turned out,
we were not as dependent as I had thought we were. The northern
distribution network and the effective partnership between DLA
and USTRANSCOM proved a successful workaround, based on the
dedicated effort, focus and outstanding support by the rank and file
members of both organizations—USTRANSCOM and their ground
component is the Surface Deployment and Distribution Command—as
well as other partners. Quite frankly, since the early part
of 2012 we’ve even grown our theater sustainment support.
Q: Staying with Afghanistan, looking at how you did things in Iraq
versus how you’re going to have to do things in Afghanistan, what
does DLA’s forward deployment structure look like in Afghanistan
in comparison to Iraq? Is the structure you have now an evolving
structure or are you where you want to be?
A: I’ll tell you like all the operators will tell you, Afghanistan is not
Iraq—but our structure is very similar. We have a DLA support team
headed up by a military 06 who manages the various commodities,
supply chains we support, and the distribution processes we have
in place. If you look at the reverse logistics, the disposition requirements,
the defense reutilization and marketing office—there are
three sites today in Afghanistan. That structure is very similar to
what we used in Iraq. We had the same reutilization and marketing
office sites, where the military members could turn in equipment
that was no longer needed or was unserviceable. In Iraq, as it came
time for the repositioning out, units were able to move some serviceable
material to us and let DLA provide the disposition services.
There were several categories of that reutilization that we were
able to use to help us identify exactly how to do that right. First of
all, we would try to redistribute it to needs that the services had. If
that didn’t work, then we would try to market it and sell it as scrap
or as unserviceable military gear. If that didn’t work, then we would
take the responsibility for demilitarizing it or destroying it and then
additionally selling that demilitarized material as scrap to eligible
consumers.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that the theme there is the deployable
agility of the DLA workforce. Some of that work I described is inherently
governmental, so we need DLA employees to step up to the
responsibility of deploying, and we’ve had incredible success with
our employees stepping up to those responsibilities.
Q: You’ve explained the structure that DLA has in Afghanistan.
Can you go a little deeper into what DLA will do to manage the
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flow of equipment and avoid mountains or iron or tremendous
backlogs?
A: The role that DLA plays and its support to the mission will be
very similar to that in Iraq: to provide a single touchpoint for the
combatant commander and his component commands inside the
AOR to turn to for disposition services and capabilities. In Iraq,
we established a place to unburden the services of excess and no
longer serviceable equipment, and ensured what went back was
exactly what had to go back. The end goal is identical in Afghanistan.
However, techniques, tactics and procedures for doing this
will be different, because we don’t have an outlet. There is no
mature government infrastructure to do business with, from a
marketing and resell environment, so our practice and our technique
of managing that will be somewhat different. We’ll have
to work carefully on how we plan to do the demilitarization, for
instance.
Let me give you an example. Today, in Iraq, we are able to
successfully market to the Iraqis. A businessman in Iraq could
purchase over 600,000 pounds of scrap from our DRMO site. We
don’t have that same enterprise opportunity in Afghanistan, but
we in DLA still have the requirement to demilitarize that material
and move it into a categorization called scrap. What we’re going
to do with that and how we actually dispose of it in that country is
something we’re working on. We don’t have any perfect answers.
Moving it out of that country, paying to ship it, is not an alternative.
It’s too expensive; we don’t get any return on that investment
for our taxpayer. So we’ll have to come up with an innovative
approach to actually dispose of that material. I’ve talked about the
reutilization and the resale and the actual disposal of it. How we
move that out of Afghanistan, off their terrain, is something we’re
working real hard.
Q: Does DLA have a seat at the table in deciding what happens to
a piece of equipment? What’s DLA’s role in that decision?
A: That’s another great question. Almost all the military equipment
over there belongs to the military services. There’s very little
actual material, actual supplies, that belong to DLA. Some of our
sustainment repair parts, for example, belong to DLA until we have
a requirement for them from the service, a point of sale if you will,
and we then transfer it to the military service that needs it. But
by and large, the things you’re talking about—military weapons
systems, trucks, communications systems, infrastructure like the
re-locatable buildings and tents—all belong to the services.
Despite that, we absolutely have a seat at the table. I would
say we’re a partner with the services on that. We’re not an equal
partner—it’s their supplies, it’s their material, it’s their weapons
systems and fighting platforms—but we absolutely sit at the table
with them and provide our expertise with regard to the tactical
questions: How can I move it to you? What condition does it need
to be in? What are the processes I need to go through to take it off
my records so the supply record-keeping is accurate? Those sort of
administrative functions that make sure the property is properly
documented and taken care of are accomplished in partnership
with the units. DLA plays a key role in that.
With regards to physically transferring property, those three
sites that I talked about occupy approximately 40 acres in theater
and we’re about to double that over the next few months as we
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