Materiel Enterprise Is the Foundation for Building Army Strategic Readiness

By Gen. Gustave Gus PernaApril 13, 2020

Gen. Gustave "Gus" Perna
Gen. Gustave "Gus" Perna is the commander of Army Materiel Command, at Redstone Arsenal, Ala. (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

While our combat troops have always been the foundation of our Army, our strategic advantage has been our ability to mobilize, deploy, and sustain our force—what Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. James McConville has described as strategic readiness. From mobilization operations and deployment, to sustainment in the field and redeployment, Army sustainers and logisticians have a significant role in building and delivering Army strategic readiness.

Mobilize

Strategic readiness starts with mobilization operations on our Army installations. Army sustainers and logisticians are critical to ensuring barracks, motor pools, maintenance facilities, Supply Support Activities, and Logistics Readiness Centers are not only operational, but functioning effectively and seamlessly to support mobilization efforts. Deploy Installations are also the foundation of our strategic power projection capability, which enables us to deploy our people and equipment rapidly and efficiently.

Our railheads, roads, airfields, and ports are how we get to the fight. Our enemies know the best way to defeat the greatest Army in the world is to stop it from ever leaving its own territory. We must ensure the critical infrastructure that moves our force from fort to port, port to port, and port to foxhole is not only ready today, but modernized to support next generation platforms, and secure to withstand cyber or physical threats. We must also continue to build the skills and reinforce the critical infrastructure that comprises our strategic power projection capability to move even more equipment, more quickly.

Sustain

Soldiers cannot fight and win on the battlefield without weapons to fire, tanks to drive, food to eat, and the logistics support to ensure those necessities get to the right place at the right time. For that reason, sustaining the force, from the industrial base to the battlefield, is also a key tenet of strategic readiness. Our end state is ensuring the right commodities are already in place when commanders and their Soldiers need them, and frontline Soldiers never have to wait on logisticians to catch up to their movements.

To help accomplish this, we will rely on logistics information to see ourselves across the entire materiel enterprise. We must be able to leverage our enterprise resource planning systems for critical data that allows commanders and logisticians to make predictive, real-time, and informed decisions.

Mobilizing, deploying, and sustaining a globally engaged Army requires synchronization and integration across the entire materiel enterprise to effectively move troops and equipment at scale and speed. We cannot rely on Industrial Age processes and systems to deliver Army readiness.

We must ensure our resources—not just funding, but time, people, and infrastructure—are aligned and precisely executed to build strategic readiness today. From weight to size and ease of mobility to cyber, we must be considering the factors that impact our ability to mobilize, deploy, and sustain our force, and modernize accordingly now. Every sustainer has an essential role in building and maintaining strategic readiness.

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Gen. Gustave "Gus" Perna is the commander of Army Materiel Command, at Redstone Arsenal, Ala.

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This article was published in the April-June 2020 issue of Army Sustainment.

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