VILSECK, Germany – Most people learn about the Army Prepositioned Stocks-2 program in military publications or by reading about it in the news, but for Cpt. Andrew Marvets his introduction to APS-2 was more direct. He learned of APS-2 while serving as a company commander for a movement control team on a rotational deployment to Europe in support of Atlantic Resolve.
Now, the 34-year-old Army officer and graduate of the University of Georgia is the operations officer at Army Field Support Battalion-Germany. APS-2 is his business, he said, and business is good.
“I was the commander of the 384th Movement Control Team out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord on a rotation to Eastern Europe in 2022,” said Marvets. “We were responsible for facilitating the flow of equipment into the Baltic States – essentially Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.”
While on that 9-month rotation, Marvets said he was fortunate enough to observe an APS-2 operation being executed at an Equipment Configuration and Handoff Area in Lithuania during the DEFENDER 22 exercise.
“From a logistics standpoint, it really piqued my interest,” said Marvets who hails from Columbus, Georgia, and has served in the Army for about eight years.
Coming from a company grade officer position in a line unit, the dynamic employment of an APS-2 unit equipment set, hundreds of tactical vehicles and equipment pieces, “caught my attention,” Marvets said. So much so, after visiting the ECHA site, he spent a considerable amount of time researching and learning about APS-2 operations and what that means to the Army and joint forces in Europe.
“The speed at which you can activate an APS-2 unit equipment set and move it within the European theater provides a lot of capabilities very quickly,” Marvets said.
Marvets’ battalion currently has mission command of the APS-2 worksite in Dülmen, Germany, and is responsible for all the APS-2 operations there. Additionally, his battalion is set to assume mission command of the Coleman APS-2 worksite in Mannheim, Germany, later this year as part of the 405th Army Field Support Brigade’s regional alignment and transformation initiative.
Germany battalion has been working directly with Army Field Support Battalion-Mannheim, meeting regularly, to prepare the way ahead, he said. Marvets and his team at AFSBn-Germany plan to use all the lessons learned over the past 15 months since assuming mission command of Dülmen and the knowledge they’re gaining from AFSBn-Mannheim to help with the transition.
“They are physically there on the ground at Coleman, and they know the equipment and the contractors, and how the facilities are laid out,” said Marvets. “That wealth of knowledge is going to physically move with them to Poland so it’s critical that my battalion meets with them now to understand their best practices and challenges. This will, in turn, help us as we assume mission command of the Coleman site.”
Simultaneously, AFSBn-Germany is preparing to support the upcoming DEFENDER 24 exercise, scheduled for this Spring. Their team at Dülmen and the battalion headquarters will be working directly with U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency to draw and issue an APS-2 hospital equipment set during this year’s DEFENDER exercise.
Marvets said USAMMA is responsible for the medical equipment and supplies at Dülmen, and AFSBn-Germany is responsible for everything else – the containers that store all the medical gear, the tactical vehicles that transport it, and more.
“In this case – essentially within one unit equipment set, two organizations are managing it,” he said.
Germany battalion is one of four battalions assigned to the 405th AFSB and is headquartered at Rose Barracks in Vilseck, Germany. In addition to its APS-2 mission at Dülmen and soon to be mission at Coleman, AFSBn-Germany is responsible for providing and coordinating tactical and operational sustainment to ensure theater readiness and enable commanders to conduct a full range of military operations.
The 405th AFSB enhances U.S. Army Europe and Africa’s readiness and capability to support the warfighter by providing turn-key APS-2 packages ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. The 405th AFSB’s APS-2 program is a key component of U.S. Army Europe and Africa’s power projection and warfighter readiness missions.
The 405th AFSB is assigned to U.S. Army Sustainment Command and under the operational control of the 21st Theater Sustainment Command, U.S. Army Europe and Africa. The brigade is headquartered in Kaiserslautern, Germany, and provides materiel enterprise support to U.S. Forces throughout Europe and Africa – providing theater sustainment logistics; synchronizing acquisition, logistics and technology; and leveraging AMC’s materiel enterprise to support joint forces. For more information on the 405th AFSB, visit the official website and the official Facebook site.
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