Army leaders have long dealt with the issue of supply chain shortages and long lead times of Class IX repair parts. It is not uncommon for several vehicles within a formation to be not fully mission capable for months or more because the parts required to fix the deficiencies are on backorder. The Army supply system is designed to mitigate the risk of shortages and long lead times. Units stock frequently consumed parts in their shop stock lists (SSLs). Supply support activities (SSAs) stock a larger set of frequently consumed parts for their supported brigades in their authorized stockage lists (ASLs). The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) stocks a larger number of parts to support units across the Army. If a part is required for a maintenance work order, it likely gets pulled from one of these three stocks to support the demand.
But what happens when none of these three stocks has the required part? DLA orders the part from the manufacturer to ship to the unit, which often incurs long lead times due to the infrequency of demand for these parts. Many of these parts, however, may be stocked at other units across the Army, but there is currently no demand signal to furnish the parts to the unit that needs them. Instead, the unit that needs the parts waits months or longer for a part to ship from the manufacturer and, in the meantime, may be down a critical asset.
Maintenance managers can research other units’ stocks to see if they can source long-lead parts from them, but this incurs high administrative costs to the unit, especially in cases where the parts may be stocked on a different installation. Rather than continue with this burdensome process, changing the way we use Army Class IX stocks combined with implementing a distribution requirements planning (DRP) background process would allow parts to be shipped to the point of need rather than sitting in unit stocks unused.
Currently, if your SSL, your supporting SSA’s ASL, and DLA do not have a part you need, the part is ordered from the manufacturer. Under this system, there is limited flexibility to source parts from the Army’s stock that are outside that support chain. Switching to a networked system using stock from adjacent units and SSAs would decrease the occurrence of needlessly ordering long-lead parts. This is similar to how commercial retail companies run their warehouse and distribution center operations. They stock certain items in warehouses throughout the country and optimally distribute products where they are required. The backbone of this system is a software application known as a DRP process. The DRP has visibility of the entire supply system for that organization, determines when and where certain products will be needed, and develops the optimal distribution plan to get those products to the point of need. Adding a background DRP to Global Combat Support System (GCSS)-Army would allow the Army to use SSLs and ASLs to accomplish the same goal.
This requires a shift in mindset from how we currently view the purpose of those stocks. Under the current system, SSLs and ASLs are siloed; the units that are supported by these stocks are the only ones meant to pull from them. While this protects the stock of these units, it prevents parts from being distributed optimally to enhance the total Army’s readiness rates. Maintenance managers often end up pulling from other units’ stocks anyway at the behest of their battalion command team. This process is not without administrative burden, though.
For using other ASLs specifically, commanders typically must furnish a newly signed signature card to the SSA and provide manually completed documentation, signed by the unit commander, maintenance manager, brigade budget officer, and brigade maintenance technician. Compounding this process over multiple different SSAs for multiple parts becomes too burdensome for most commanders, arguably our busiest Army leaders, to handle without sacrificing their time in other areas. This informal process of sourcing parts from outside your organization could be completely replaced by the DRP module.
There are different levels of implementation for this module that come with different levels of risk. The most basic level of implementation would build the DRP to only draw from the stocks of adjacent units. This is best illustrated with an example. In a battalion, each company has its own supporting SSL. Under the current system, if Alpha Company orders a part that is not in their SSL, but Bravo Company has it in their SSL, GCSS-Army does not show that the battalion has the part stocked. With a DRP process, Alpha Company would automatically see that Bravo Company has the part they require. Bravo Company would receive a notification requesting a turn-in to Alpha Company, in the same way that they would receive a notification to turn in an excess or recoverable item to the SSA. This concept could carry over to a grander scale, requiring battalions within the same brigade, SSAs in the same division, or SSAs on the same installation to issue parts between each other to optimally meet demand.
At a higher level of implementation, the DRP could be built to factor in unit deployment statuses, work order priority, and equipment readiness codes. For deployed units, high-priority work orders, and PACERs, there may be a need to resource parts from outside adjacent units’ stocks. Depending on these three factors, the DRP could pull resources from across installations.
For example, if an armor brigade were deployed to a combat zone and required a long-lead part for a PACER 02 priority workorder, that would prompt the DRP to check against the stock of every unit in the Army. Assuming it found the part stocked somewhere, it could arrange for that part to be turned in by the owning unit and implement an automatic funds verification-and-use authorization to have it shipped to the brigade. While this is an extreme example, it illustrates the variables that can be built into the module and tweaked as necessary to balance costs with improving equipment readiness. The transportation cost of implementing this would be high, especially for shipments outside the continental U.S., but it would work to the benefit of the units that need those parts the most.
The risk inherent to this process is that these stocks become short on the parts that the organic unit needs because they were distributed to other units. Two methods of mitigating this risk are minimum organic stockage (MOS) levels and commander approval notifications. Implementing an MOS level for each part within your stock would ensure that other units may requisition parts from you so long as the quantity of those parts does not exceed the MOS.
The background Material Requirements Planning (MRP) module in GCSS-Army currently determines which parts are needed in stock, how much should be stocked, and what the reorder point of those parts should be. Enabling the MRP to calculate an MOS would ensure other units could get the parts they needed while protecting your stocks for your own future use. Additionally, the DRP would be built to discern between restricted and unrestricted stock. Restricted stock are parts that have already been dedicated to a work order but have not yet been issued.
Requiring that the DRP did not pull from restricted stock would ensure that parts currently dedicated to work orders would not be requested by outside units. Implementing a commander’s approval for DRP distribution decisions would also ensure that commanders were aware of which parts were being taken from their stock. This would be similar to the digital dispatch approval notifications for those in the GCSS-Army commander representative role. These notifications give commanders or their delegates the ability to deny requests for parts that they anticipate may be important to an upcoming mission.
A second-order effect from the implementation of the DRP would be a clean-up of unit stocks across the Army. There are many parts in SSLs and ASLs across the Army that have not been touched in years. Historical Class IX parts like these have no use sitting around containers and taking up space for the owning unit if a different unit could use those parts. Careful attention must be paid to ensure that the credit for the demand signal goes to the requesting unit and not the owning unit. This ensures that the historical part is used but does not get reordered by the owning unit, making room for other frequently ordered parts in their SSL.
Equipment readiness is inherent to unit lethality. Our ability to rapidly regenerate combat power may be the difference between mission success and failure in a near-peer conflict. In large-scale combat operations, units will not have the luxury of waiting months for crucial repair parts. Parts lying dormant in one unit’s SSL may prove to be vital for another unit’s combat effectiveness. Implementing this new system and DRP process would ultimately use the Army’s total Class IX stocks more effectively at the point of need, reduce maintenance downtime for key combat platforms, and enhance our equipment readiness to outmatch our rivals in competition and conflict.
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1LT Spencer Walsh serves as the maintenance control officer for the 62nd Engineer Battalion, 36th Engineer Brigade, in Fort Hood, Texas. He is a 2022 graduate from the U.S. Military Academy, where he commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Ordnance Corps. He previously served as the maintenance platoon leader in Hotel Forward Support Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, and the executive officer of Alpha Company, 15th Brigade Support Battalion, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in business management and the Certified Professional in Supply Management certification.
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This article was published with the winter 2026 issue of Army Sustainment.
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