[Editor's Note: This article is this edition's winner of the ASU Writing Competition. The competition is open quarterly to current ASU students and faculty. Visit the ASPB website for more information.]
From the contested landscapes of Eastern Europe to the vast expanses of the Indo-Pacific, today’s Army confronts a complex and everchanging operational environment. Meeting these diverse challenges demands a future-focused approach to sustainment, one where data-centricity is not a destination but a journey of continuous learning and adaptation. While the Army’s modernization efforts, including the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army and the forthcoming Army Data and Analytics Platform, promise unprecedented data capabilities, they also underscore the need for continuous transformation within our training and education systems. The Army must build on the concepts of data literacy and cultivate a culture that embraces lifelong learning. Embedding adaptability into sustainment curriculum fosters a growth mindset, which allows sustainers to master not just today’s tools but the tools of tomorrow.
Building a Digital Data-Centric Sustainment Force
The Army Data Plan and DoD Data Strategy laid the foundation for treating data as a strategic asset, leading to increased training and integration efforts across the force. Initiatives like West Point’s Data Literacy 101: Train the Trainer program have played key roles in percolating data literacy skills throughout the Army by empowering representatives to educate their respective formations. Building on these efforts, Army Sustainment University (ASU) executes a multitiered data education strategy, which maps data literacy skills to sustainment warfighting functional requirements.
Currently, this education is delivered through two levels: Level I (foundational), a 16-hour course covering basic data literacy, computational methods (spreadsheets), and math concepts (statistics); and Level II (intermediate), a 40-hour course building on foundational concepts and covering skills such as data wrangling, exploratory analysis, and data source management. In addition to foundational courses, ASU offers the 10-day resident Data Analysis and Visualization Course, which builds on foundational concepts and provides more in-depth training on tools like Excel and Power BI for data-driven logistical problem solving. To expand access to data education, ASU is also developing a 16-hour asynchronous Data Education for Logisticians Interactive Multimedia Instruction course, slated for release in October 2025. This self-paced online format will provide data training to a wider audience, including new civilian hires, and will enable sustainers to revisit specific data education skills when the need arises for implementation at their respective units.
These initiatives provide a solid foundation, but to truly empower a data-driven sustainment community, ASU focuses on bridging the gap between software proficiency and the development of enduring, adaptable analytical skills. This requires a deliberate focus on cultivating habits of mind that transcend specific tools and technologies, while ensuring academic rigor aligns with the practical demands of data-driven decision making in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
Developing Enduring Data Skills
While the Army’s commitment to data literacy is a vital first step, cultivating a data-centric force requires enduring data skills that extend beyond tool proficiency. While current systems like Excel or Power BI are important, sustainers must develop adaptable, analytical habits of mind — the ability to strategically approach data challenges regardless of the software systems or tools. Building on the foundation of data literacy, education curriculum must balance software proficiency with the development of these enduring competencies, ensuring sustainers can adapt to new technologies and evolving mission demands throughout their careers.
The Operations Research and Systems Analysis (ORSA) Military Applications Course (MAC) offers a valuable model. ORSA MAC maintains a dynamically updated online supplement to its curriculum, ensuring students, graduates, and the broader ORSA community have access to the current tools and, more importantly, the latest approaches or techniques. The ORSA curriculum focuses on technology-neutral objectives — for example, “answer a research question through hypothesis testing” — allowing instructors to select appropriate software while teaching fundamental ORSA techniques. Most importantly, students are encouraged to combine classroom instruction with outside research to solve ill-defined problems. This approach is further cultivated by the feedback provided by operational ORSAs external to ASU during validation exercises.
As a result, the curriculum remains agile and relevant, empowering students of today to meet the demands of the rapidly changing environment.
Cultivating a Culture of Continuous Learning
To foster this culture of continuous learning and adaptability, a robust knowledge-sharing ecosystem must be established within the sustainment community. This begins with a centralized digital repository, modeled after those common in academia, where faculty, students, and sustainment professionals contribute to and access data-related research, case studies, and best practices. This repository will provide a valuable resource for sustainers seeking to expand their knowledge, apply proven methodologies to new challenges, and contribute to the growing body of knowledge in data-driven sustainment. The community could leverage existing platforms such as the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), expanding its scope to include a dedicated focus area for data-related lessons learned from sustainment operations. By capturing and disseminating these insights, sustainers ensure that valuable knowledge gained in the field is readily accessible to the sustainment community.
Opportunities for sustainers to connect and collaborate in person will complement the digital repository. Regular workshops, potentially held at organizations like ASU or during major training exercises and training centers, will provide dynamic learning environments where participants engage in hands-on exercises, share best practices, and explore emerging data analysis tools and techniques. These workshops could be tailored to specific sustainment functions (e.g., logistics, maintenance, transportation) or focus on broader data analysis themes, such as predictive modeling, data visualization, or risk analysis. The interactive nature of these workshops will allow sustainers to learn from each other’s experiences, build professional networks, and gain practical skills applicable to their unique operational contexts.
These workshops and the digital repository could be further enhanced by leveraging the content and audience of the Army Sustainment Professional Bulletin. The bulletin already features articles on data-driven logistics, supply chain optimization, and predictive logistics. Collaboration between the sustainment community and Army Sustainment would amplify this impact by focusing on in-depth case studies of successful data-driven projects and explorations of emerging analytical techniques and technologies. These articles would provide practical examples and actionable insights for sustainers seeking to apply data analysis within their own operational contexts. By highlighting these real-world applications of data analysis, a community of continuous learning among sustainment professionals is fostered.
Conclusion
As the Army continues to transform into a digitally data-centric force, ASU plays a vital role in equipping sustainers with the skills and mindset needed to navigate this evolving landscape. Building on the foundation of data literacy, ASU is well positioned to embrace an increasingly agile and adaptable approach to data education, one that balances software proficiency with the cultivation of enduring analytical skills. By fostering a robust knowledge-sharing ecosystem, leveraging existing resources like CALL and Army Sustainment, and creating opportunities for collaboration through workshops and conferences, the sustainment community empowers its members to become not just consumers of data, but also insightful analysts and innovative problem solvers. This transformation is essential for ensuring the Army’s logistical readiness and strategic advantage in an increasingly complex and data-driven world. Investing in the continuous learning and adaptable capabilities of sustainers ensures that the Army remains equipped and ready to prevail on any battlefield.
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LTC Ryan E. Miller currently serves as an instructor for the Operations Research and Systems Analysis Military Applications Course within the College of Applied Logistics and Operational Sciences at Army Sustainment University (ASU), Fort Lee, Virginia. He serves as the project lead for the ASU data science study and primary proponent for the Data Education for Logisticians Interactive Multimedia Instruction development. He holds a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics from the Naval Postgraduate School.
MAJ Brian T. Johnson is an Operations Research and Systems Analysis (ORSA) Military Application Course instructor within the College of Applied Logistics and Operational Sciences at Army Sustainment University, Fort Lee, Virginia. He was commissioned as an adjutant general officer from Officer Candidate School in 2011 and voluntarily transferred to Functional Area 49 (ORSA) in 2020. He has a master’s degree in operations research from the Air Force Institute of Technology.
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This article was published in the summer 2025 issue of Army Sustainment.
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