Braxton Taylor
Virtually all of the Army’s weapons are affected by delayed or backordered parts—and mismatched computer systems are largely to blame. And it’s only been a month since a new digital tool has started to replicate that.
“Our supply chain is huge. The Army doesn’t buy all of its own parts. In fact, 90 percent of our parts—mostly low-dollar, high-volume expendables, things that go pretty quick, consumable-type stuff—we actually rely on the Defense Logistics Agency to buy them,” Richard Martin, Army Materiel Command’s director for supply chain management, told reporters on Wednesday.
“Using a Black Hawk helicopter as an example, the Army has the lion’s share. The Navy also flies a similar aircraft. The Air Force flies a similar aircraft. The Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, they all have similar-type aircraft,” Martin said, at a media event following the Association of the U.S. Army’s industrial-base readiness event on Wednesday.
But each of those entities has their own business systems. And just over a year ago, the Army realized that DLA’s systems weren’t showing data from the service’s maintenance and supply systems—and what they did get was unreadable.
Over the last year, the service developed a tool—Army Materiel Command Predictive Analysis Suite, or APAS—that allows them to share information back and forth with DLA. They started using it in December.
“There’s still some bugs in it, if you will. But it’s definitely allowing them to see…the depth [of detail] that we’re trying to get to and lets DLA make that procurement decision,” he said.
“It lets DLA recognize what we are ultimately consuming,” he said. Before the systems were properly connected, the Army would need 20 of a particular part for a weapon every month, for example, but DLA would receive that data as needing 20 every few months. This created a backlog.
“They would see, ‘hey, I need 100 [of this part]’ and the reality was I not only needed 100 immediately, because there are weapon systems down for that part, I actually needed another 200 to replenish my stocks,” he said.
APAS also lets the Army see DLA’s lead times for part delivery and how much the agency is buying, enabling the service to manage the parts needed to make weapons operational and replenish stockpiles.
The Defense Logistics Agency handles about 5 million national stock numbers—that is, individual parts—across the military services.
“We’ve started with DLA and the Army because we found that all the services we’re doing forecasting separately and differently and managing their systems differently, and we needed to have a way to share the data so we could see what they were consuming and have predictive analytics we could look at where we need to have parts bought ahead of need,” Kristin French, DLA’s deputy director for logistics operations, told reporters on Wednesday.
This accountability is crucial for industry to have enough time to configure and startup manufacturing lines, French said.
“It takes them, sometimes a year, 18 months—in munitions, two years or more—to get parts or items,” she said.
The DLA and the Army started a data-sharing working group, and now uses a system with API interfaces that allows the two organizations to see supply needs and availability.
“We have to do it through protocols, because the systems are different, but we do it through API Interfaces where we can talk to each other and see what they’re consuming so we can predict what we will need to procure the future requirements,” French said.
Sharing data is one of the biggest challenges in sustainment and logistics, said Steven Morani, the acting secretary of defense for sustainment. The Pentagon has been using its main data analytics platform, ADVANA, for logistics data from across the services.
“And that actually accelerated our ability to get the weapons systems performance data into a shared environment. And it allowed us to make progress on an area that we had been quite honestly struggling to get agreements on, and that was performance metrics,” which details the health and status of various platforms, Morani told reporters during a Defense Writers Group event on Friday.
Today, all services are putting in that data in the same way thanks to guidance issued last year. “We’re using that data to see ourselves better,” Morani said. In 2025, the Pentagon plans to add supply data metrics in hopes that it will “move us from this pool system, where the units are having to send that demand signal, for us to see the demand signal through data, understand consumption rates, and now push materiel there before you know a unit runs out. And that’s really the goal of what we’re trying to do.”
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