The Joint Munitions Command (JMC) is responsible for providing joint forces with ready, reliable, and lethal munitions at the right place and time to support global operations. JMC comprises teams from across the ammunition enterprise that are committed to delivering ammunition at the point of need.
JMC MISSION
JMC's vision is to be the Department of Defense's munitions sustainer?, ensuring global munitions readiness. The command stores, distributes, produces, and demilitarizes small-, medium-, and large-caliber ammunition, ranging from the rounds used by all military services to the bunker-buster bombs used by the Navy and Air Force. JMC is the logistics integrator for the life-cycle management of ammunition. Essentially, JMC operationalizes the ammunition enterprise.
JMC manages a nationwide network of organic industrial-base facilities that sustain critical capabilities, meet current mission requirements, and provide the ability to surge production of ammunition stocks as required. This network is commonly characterized by the Army Materiel Command as our national security insurance policy--the centerpiece to readiness. JMC continuously strives to smartly right-size, make invulnerable, and modernize its organic industrial base so that it can thrive and surge in an uncertain and complex world to fulfill joint munitions requirements.
CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT
Before 9/11, JMC's management of class V was a pull system. Requisitions were accepted through a range of methods from the various services and customers. This provided limited checks and balances and sometimes delivered too much ammunition to ammunition supply points (ASPs).
In 2002, as part of a Chief of Staff of the Army initiative, Centralized Ammunition Management (CAM) was established to enable the integration of wholesale and retail ammunition management. CAM is a push system that encompasses five regions across the United States: Northwest, Northeast, Midwest, Southwest, and Southeast. JMC ships millions of rounds of ammunition annually to ASPs in these five regions. CAM aligns JMC's ammunition plants, depots, and customers with JMC's Integrated Logistics Strategy to achieve optimum network efficiency. It allows customers to maintain visibility of requisitions and is a seamless process for the field.
JMC uses CAM to supply ASPs in support of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and the test community. CAM prevents an excess buildup of ammunition at the ASPs by requiring training authorizations to be assessed against stock on hand to determine the correct ammunition levels.
JMC receives, stores, issues, and distributes ammunition through its regional hubs to enable outload support and power projection of munitions in support of COCOMs, contingencies, training, and operation plans. JMC is also heavily involved in foreign military sales in support of global strategic priorities and operations. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Brig. Gen. Stephen E. Farmen is the commanding general of the Security Assistance Command. He was formerly the commanding general of the Joint Munitions and Lethality Life Cycle Management Command and the Joint Munitions Command. He has a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Richmond and a master's degree in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College. He attended the Joint Forces Staff College and completed a Senior Service College fellowship as the first military fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Transportation and Logistics.
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This article was published in the July-August 2016 issue of Army Sustainment magazine.
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