The Projected Impact of F-35B on USMC Operational Costs

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07/07/2010

By Lieutenant General George J. Trautman, III, Deputy Commandant for USMC Aviation

Affordability is the balance of cost and capabilities required to accomplish assigned missions. For over a decade the Marine Corps has avoided the cost of new procurement during a time when the service life of our legacy aircraft were sufficient to meet the missions assigned. However, in the near future, our investment in the capabilities of the F-35B will outweigh the unavoidable legacy aircraft operations and sustainment (O&S) cost increases we will incur with the F/A-18, AV-8B, and EA-6B.

Figure 1 General Trautman in Afghanistan, November 2009 (Credit Photo: USMC)
General Trautman in Afghanistan (Credit Photo: USMC, November 2009)

The O&S costs of legacy aircraft across DoD have been increasing at an average rate of 7.8% per year since 2000. The operational lifetimes of legacy aircraft are being extended well beyond their original design limits. As a result, we have been continually engaged in a struggle to maintain operational readiness of our legacy aircraft due largely to the increasing age of the aircraft fleet. Early in an aircraft’s life cycle, the principal challenge is primarily attributed to the aging proprietary avionics systems upon which the the user depends for warfighting relevance; later it is maintenance of the airframe and hardware components that are become the O&S cost drivers.

The Marine Corps strategy for the last eleven years has been to forego the procurement new variants of legacy aircraft and continuing a process of trying to sustain old designs that inherit the obsolescence and fatigue life issues of their predecessors. Instead, we opted to transition to a new 5th generation aircraft that takes advantage of technology improvements which generate substantial savings in ownership cost. The capabilities of the F-35B enable the Marine Corps to replace three legacy aircraft types and retain the capability of executing all our missions. This results in tangible O&S cost savings.

A common platform produces a common support and sustainment base. By necking down to one type of aircraft we eliminate a threefold redundancy in manpower, operating materiel, support services, training, maintenance competencies, technical systems management, tools, and aircraft upgrades. For example:

  • Direct military manpower will be reduced by 30%; approximately 340 officers and 2600 enlisted.
  • Within the Naval Aviation Enterprise we will reduce the technical management requirements the systems requiring support by 60%.
  • Peculiar Support Equipment will be reduced by 60%; down from 1,400 to 400 line items.
  • Simulators and training support systems will be reduced by 80%; five different training systems will neck down to one.
  • Electronic Attack WRA’s will be reduced by 40% and replaced with easier to support state of the art digital electronics.
  • The Performance Based Logistics construct will nearly eliminate macro and micro avionics repair, and intermediate propulsion support functions.
  • Airborne Armament Equipment (AAE) will be reduced by over 80% with the incorporation of a multi-use bomb rack.
  • Compared to historical parametrics we expect our overall O&S costs to decrease by 30%.

The key to enabling these reductions is to evolve our supportability concepts, processes and procedures instead of shackling ourselves to a support infrastructure built for legacy aircraft. We need to be innovative and ensure our sustainment posture keeps pace with technology advancements and global partnering synergies. Working together with industry, the Marine Corps is intently focused on the future as we seek innovative cost effective sustainment strategies that match the game changing operational capabilities resident in the F-35 Litening II.

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***Posted on July 7th, 2010

The Petraeus Challenge

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By Richard Weitz

One of the challenges General David Petraeus, U.S. Army, faces as the newly appointed commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is the failure of past efforts to induce many of the Taliban guerrillas to defect and some of the Taliban leaders to negotiate a peace settlement with the internationally recognized Kabul government led by President Hamid Karzai. The Afghan government and its foreign backers differentiate between “reintegration” and “reconciliation.” The former concept involves inducing lower-level Taliban fighters to cease fighting and return to civilian life, while reconciliation entails negotiating a political settlement with senior Taliban leaders who are willing to break with al-Qaeda. At the January 2010 London Conference on Afghanistan, foreign governments pledged millions of dollars to support these initiatives, which are seen as complementary to the military operations in ending the fighting since NATO forces and their Afghan government allies cannot expect to kill or capture all the Taliban insurgents.

Figure 1 Newly appointed International Security Assistance Forces Commander, Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and NATO's Senior Civilian Representative to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill are greeted by the Commander of ISAF Joint Command Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez upon their arrival to Kabul, Afghanistan (Credit Photo: ISAF Joint Command)
Newly appointed International Security Assistance Forces Commander, General David Petraeus, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and NATO's Senior Civilian Representative to Afghanistan Mark Sedwill are greeted by the Commander of ISAF Joint Command Lieutenant- General David Rodriguez upon their arrival to Kabul, Afghanistan (Credit Photo: ISAF Joint Command, July 2010)

Karzai has come under increasing pressure this year by war-weary governments to make progress in his domestic reforms in order to strengthen his government against the insurgents. When they met in the Canadian city of Muskoka, the leaders of the Group of Eight industrial countries singled out Afghanistan as one of the major international security issues preoccupying world leaders in their June 26 summit communiqué. Although the G-8 leaders remain united in their opposition to the Taliban, after almost a decade of fighting they are eager to reduce their military, financial, and other costly support for the Kabul government. Reminding Karzai of the many commitments he adopted at the January 2010 London Conference, the G-8 leaders pressed him to assume leadership of the Afghan War. The G-8 summit declaration further called on the Afghan government to “expand the capacity of the Afghan National Security Forces to assume increasing responsibility for security within five years,” adding that “we fully support the transition strategy adopted by International Security Assistance Force contributors in April.” The text also backed Karzai’s efforts to reintegrate defecting Taliban guerrillas and negotiate a political reconciliation with moderate Taliban leaders. In this respect,” it claimed, “the June Peace Jirga was an important milestone.”

Nonetheless, the June 2-4 National Consultative Peace Jirga, billed as a measure to pursue a national consensus on a peace plan, has thus far failed to have much impact on reducing the fighting because the Taliban rejected the process. More than 1,600 delegates tribal elders, religious leaders, and other influential members of Afghan society participated in the three-day assembly, but almost all the attendees were supporters of Karzai or at least opponents of his Taliban adversaries. They discussed the main terms of Karzai’s proposed peace plan, which would demand that Taliban leaders break with al-Qaida, cease military action, and accept the main tenets of the current Afghan constitution. In return, the Afghan government would work with its international partners to remove them from the U.N. terrorist blacklist. The Afghan authorities would also permit some former Taliban leaders to re-enter political life in Afghanistan while others would receive assistance to relocate to a third country.

Until now, the only issue the main Taliban leadership loyal to Mullah Omar has expressed interest in discussing is how rapidly foreign forces will leave Afghanistan. They greeted the inauguration of the Peace Jirga with rocket attacks and suicide bombers. But at some point the Taliban might try to follow the North Vietnamese example and pretend to endorse a peace settlement and democratic principles in order to secure a withdrawal of foreign troops. They then could resume their offensive against Afghan security forces that have yet to establish their military effectiveness, knowing that Western publics would prevent their publics from sending their troops back. The Pakistani Taliban has employed their stratagem in the past, ostentatiously negotiating truces with the military in order to allow their forces to rest and regroup before resuming their attacks shortly thereafter.

(Credit Photo: Regimental Combat Team-7, 1st Marine Division Public Affairs)

Karzai and Western leaders have repeatedly insisted that their reconciliation offer does not extend to al-Qaeda members, who are seen as alien foreign elements whose extremist convictions and past terrorist activities make them unacceptable negotiating partners. Yet, it is unclear whether it will ever be possible to split Taliban leaders from their al-Qaeda allies. The leaders of the two extremist groups share the immediate aim of driving Western troops out of Afghanistan so that they can depose Karzai and reestablish a strict Islamic government in which they enjoy a monopoly of political and religious power. In theory, the two groups profess divergent long-term objections outside of Afghanistan. Taliban representatives insist their political ambitions are confined to Afghanistan, and that they would not support Islamic insurgencies in other countries or support international terrorism. But al-Qaeda leaders continue to declare their goal to be establishing radical Islamist regimes throughout the Muslim world and waging war against a long list of foreign governments that they see as resisting this objective or describe as Muslim oppressors. In any case, it is hard to see how if the Taliban returned to power, it would use force to prevent al-Qaeda from reestablishing its military presence in Afghanistan and using these new base camps to organize additional terrorist attacks in other countries. The Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan are closely integrated at the operational level, with al-Qaeda members embedded in most important Taliban field operations.

There is much greater international support for efforts to reintegrate lower-level Taliban foot soldiers who may have joined the insurgency for money or other non-ideological reasons. The hope is that they might be induced to desert in return for suitable compensation. Despite some impressions, reintegration involves more than simply giving Taliban members money to cease fighting, which would be a terrific recruiting tool for the insurgents since almost everyone would join their ranks to get funded. Rather, the reintegration process involves providing jobs, vocational training, housing, and other benefits that would allow rank-and-file Taliban insurgents to make a better living than they do now as hired fighters.

In late June, Karzai finally approved his long-discussed reintegration plan. According to the draft plans in circulation at the time of Karzai’s visit to Washington in May, the Afghan government would put many of these ex-fighters in demobilization centers for up to three months, where they would be “de-radicalized” through special classes modeled after those employed in Saudi Arabia and other procedures. They would also receive occupational training in preparation for employment in such fields as construction, farming, tailoring, electrical repairs, and other jobs requiring minimal training and education. A new Engineering and Construction Corps and Agriculture Conservation Corps would employ some former fighters to build national highways, irrigation networks, and other major public infrastructure projects. The government would also pay these ex-guerrillas to help respond to natural disasters, such as floods. Some of the former fighters would be allowed to enroll in the Afghan National Army and Police, despite the risk that they might rejoin the Taliban again after receiving government-funded training and weapons. Karzai’s proposes to create a High Level Peace Council to oversee this reintegration process. Taliban defectors would receive a biometric identification card, with the data shared with the Afghan authorities to discourage defectors from rejoining the insurgency or attempting to reintegrate multiple times to receive additional benefits. The reintegration process would be rolled out gradually, with implementation beginning in the provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Herat, Baghdis, Nangarhar, Kunduz, and Baghlan. The hope is that any problems with the reintegration strategy would become evident early on, allowing for timely mid-course corrections.

The intent of these and other safeguards is to overcome the problems that undermined the success of previous reintegration efforts. To prevent them from returning to the battlefield, the government must be able to find them suitable alternative employment, protect them from reprisals from either their former government adversaries or their former Taliban allies, and guard against sham defectors seeking to infiltrate its ranks. In past reintegration schemes, many of the former fighters subsequently took up arms again because of implementation problems at the local level. In many cases, the fighters did not receive adequate financial assistance, employment retraining, and protection for their safety, leaving them vulnerable to retaliation from both the Taliban and their former government opponents. Yet, Afghan authorities must not offer so much compensation to their former enemies that those who remained loyal become angered that their fidelity was not rewarded.

Figure 3 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2010/0128/At-London-Afghanistan-conference-a-developing-script-of-withdrawal (Credit Photo: Reuters)

At the London Conference, the international community promised to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to support Taliban reintegration. All too often, though, foreign governments have failed to fulfill their pledges with concrete assistance. Another problem is that the years of fighting have left Afghan public institutions so weak that they will find it a challenge to either entice many Taliban fighters to defect or to keep them sufficiently satisfied afterwards that they do not rejoin the insurgency. The high levels of Afghan public corruption will dilute the impact of those foreign pledges of financial assistance that are ever fulfilled. International donors confront the choice of either accepting considerable financial leakage in their funding of reintegration projects or abandoning their efforts pending a change in Afghan cultural practices, which are unlikely to soon change. Citing these weaknesses, foreign donors tend to bypass Afghan government institutions and deal directly with local tribal leaders or other extra-governmental structures, which compounds the problem by limiting their contributions to building Afghan state capacity. In addition, these independent groups suffer from their own capacity and corruption problems. Furthermore, according to Kai Eide, the previous UN Special Representative to Afghanistan, one reason the Taliban insurgency had been spreading throughout Afghanistan is that military priorities have determined international development efforts, resulting in aid flowing to the violent southern provinces, breeding resentment elsewhere among communities that have stayed loyal to the government, rather than being more evenly distributed across the country. Western-supported reintegration projects, many of which will be funded by U.S. military commanders in their localities, will need to encourage Taliban resettlement, employment, and other opportunities throughout Afghanistan. Relocating Taliban defectors to other localities could also decrease their vulnerability to retribution by their former comrades-in-arms.

One reason for the slower than anticipated progress in the reconciliation and reintegration processes is that Western governments have discouraged Karzai from engaging in genuine peace negotiations with Taliban leaders until coalition forces have had the opportunity to reverse the situation on the battlefield. U.S. policy makers in particular want to take advantage of the ongoing surge in NATO combat forces in Afghanistan—which should number about 150,000 by August, of which some two thirds will be American—to shake Taliban commanders’ conviction that they will win the war. The hope is that the reconciliation and reintegration processes will weaken the insurgency sufficiently that the Afghan military — newly enlarged and trained with considerable foreign assistance — will prove adequate to overcoming the remaining hard-liners, even after foreign troops reverse their current surge and scale down their presence during the next few years.

After the G-8 summit, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), claimed that the Taliban would be forces to negotiate a peace agreement because they could never defeat the international military forces or win much popular support among Afghans. He acknowledged that the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies would likely engage in “spectacular types of activities” designed to demonstrate their military capabilities, meaning that, “The end is going to be painful before it gets better.” One fortuitous advantage de Mistura brings to his new assignment is that he led the U.N. mission in Iraq when General. Petraeus led the successful counterinsurgency campaign there. De Mistura optimistically observed that Gen. Petraeus would make “quite a difference” in Afghanistan because in Iraq he had “showed a remarkable capacity of combining military skills with diplomatic sensitivity, cultural sensitivity and political finessing, which is quite a rare combination.”

Shortly after the G-8 summit, however, the Taliban leadership again rejected negotiating a political settlement until foreign military forces withdrew from Afghanistan, which would place the still weak Afghan government military and police in a difficult situation. On June 28, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction warned that most of these Afghan Security Forces were unprepared to resist the Taliban without further foreign assistance. “Serious challenges affect U.S. and Coalition assessment efforts, including security conditions, mentor shortages, and inadequate training,” the report said. “Further, systemic deficiencies have undermined efforts to develop unit capabilities,” including widespread narcotics use and illiteracy. Many of these issues will be discussed at the international conference that will occur later this month in Kabul. Senior officials from the more than 70 partner countries of the Afghan government, as well as supportive international and regional organizations and financial institutions, are scheduled to attend. The main concern now is that the Afghan parliamentary elections scheduled for September could prove to be as much a debacle as last year’s presidential elections, which severely undermined the legitimacy of President Karzai. The G-8 summit declaration warns that, “Clear steps by Afghanistan towards more credible, inclusive and transparent parliamentary elections in September will be an important step forward in the country’s maturing democracy. We reaffirm our commitment to support Afghanistan in this process of transition and development.”

Despite this profession of support, wavering Western will has repeatedly caused problems for both reintegration and reconciliation efforts. On the one hand, the reluctance of Western publics to support an enduring defense commitment in Afghanistan comparable to that provided South Korea and West Germany during the Cold War is motivated their governments to seek a negotiated settlement that would allow for a Western military withdrawal. Many European governments have already announced sharp reductions in their military contributions in coming years to appease their publics. On the other hand, this visible lack of strong Western backing has contributed to the failure of past reintegration and reconciliation efforts in Afghanistan. The Taliban has long sought to convey the message to Afghans and Pakistanis that they should not resist their movement because they will eventually prevail once Western troops invariably leave. Many Taliban leaders now believe that they merely need to sustain their military pressure for a few more years and NATO forces will depart, allowing the Taliban to overwhelm the weak Afghan National Army. Further Western wavering could deepen such perceptions. Petraeus must now hope that the large but temporary NATO troop increase will establish a more benign security environment that will provide Afghan authorities and their foreign backers with an opportunity to fortify their state institutions, including the security forces and other public bodies, sufficiently to resist the insurgents even after Western military and financial commitments to the Afghan government sharply decline.

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***Posted on July 7th, 2010

Crafting the F-35 Sustainment Approach: A Central Element of the Con-Ops of the New Aircraft System

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06/29/2010
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SLD sat down with Kimberly Gavaletz, Vice President from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, and head of the F-35 Autonomic Logistics Global Sustainment Program, to discuss the F-35 sustainment approach.  The F-35 is a new generation “flying combat system” which is built around a man-machine interface, which builds on developments in the F-22 program.  The man-machine capabilities of the aircraft built around the integrated sensors of the aircraft will shape the operational concepts of the aircraft and lead to “re-norming” of air operations.

Although the sustainment of the aircraft is not as exciting a subject as air combat, it is fundamental to the con-ops of the aircraft, and will facilitate significant improvements in projected sorties rates.  In other words, sustainment is shaped as well by the man-machine interface as recently discussed by Gunnery Sgt. Thomas, the head maintainer of the F-35B at Pax River.  In this interview, Kimberly Gavaletz explains various aspects of the sustainment effort.

SLD: Traditional military aircraft programs historically have thought of maintenance as a bolt on capability or requirement, whereas this program was shaped with maintenance at the heart of the program.  How does the maintenance approach affect the capability of the aircraft?

Kimberly Gavaletz:  For the F-35, the maintenance approach has been a consideration since the inception of the aircraft.  F-35 is an Air System.  The Air System contains both the aircraft and the sustainment solution. The aircraft was designed to be highly reliable and easy to maintain, requiring significantly less maintenance than legacy systems.  For example, sustainment drove aircraft panel placement to  allow accessibility to parts that need to be maintained.  Another example is the design of the prognostics health management system, PHM, into the aircraft allowing the jet to monitor its own health.  PHM detects and isolates faults, while predicting failures, and stores that information for later analysis or immediate transmission.

F-35 support systems were designed and used in the factory and flight test so that by the time the aircraft are deployed to the fleet, the sustainment system with its information infrastructure, support equipment, and supply chain have been fully tested and matured to work in the operational environment.

Sustainment was implemented to aligned to provide the sortie generation rate that the war fighters will need for the aircraft. The design and build of the aircraft has been central to shaping an approach to generating effective sortie generation rates. The maintenance approach is truly a part of building the aircraft, testing the aircraft and using the aircraft.
SLD: The F-35 is really the first aircraft built for the knowledge age and is built on a man/machine interface, whether it be the Distributed Aperture System (DAS) or sensor fusing, this is also true for the maintenance system. Could you describe how this man/machine interface for maintenance changes the maintenance game?

 

Kimberly Gavaletz:  The man/machine interface for the maintenance portion of the F-35  starts with the aircraft itself which was designed using Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application (CATIA) drawings. The CATIA engineering drawings initiate a digital thread that  sustainment  pulls all the way through  into the Autonomic Information System (ALIS) which contains the joint technical data used to maintain the aircraft.  So the digital thread, the man/machine interface, extends from the person engineering the aircraft all the way through to the portable maintenance aid (PMA) used by the person maintaining the aircraft.

The PMA contains the configuration of the aircraft and the joint technical data that matches the particular aircraft on which the maintainer is working. Before the maintainer begins maintenance on the aircraft, he can refresh himself on training he received back at the Integrated Training Center on the Air System Maintenance Trainer.

The PMA transmits the work order to the maintainer, properly positions the needed supply and support equipment and ultimately facilitates maintainer sign-off at work order completion.

F-35 Sustainment brings everything together — the knowledge about the health of the aircraft, a trained maintainer with needed information, supplies and support to return the aircraft to service, the necessary back room support to properly position the supply chain and the reach back into sustaining engineering for tough problems through anomaly reporting.

So in all aspects of the maintainer’s job, there is  a man/machine interface through ALIS and the PMA enabling him to plug into technical information and reach back necessary to complete his actions effectively and efficiently.

SLD: In the cost debate about the F-35, one thing that seems to be missing is the question of supply chain impacts on costs.  When buying a legacy aircraft in 2010 you are relying on a supply chain that may not be there through the life of the aircraft making it very costly. With the F-35 being a new aircraft with a forward leaning supply chain. Could you talk a little bit about that supply chain that you built?

Kimberly Gavaletz:  As never done before, F-35 requirements were levied on the sustainment system. Over one fourth of the requirements for the air system were in the area of supportability and sustainability of the aircraft. F-35 levied reliability requirements out to our supply base.  So, from the beginning the suppliers have been a part of meeting those reliability requirements and in meeting the health of the air system in its ability to generate effective sortie rates.

F-35 did not stop at the design and manufacture of the aircraft.  We have created a Global Delivery System (GDS), in which we have merged the demand signals from the production line and the needed supply base for sustainment to keep the aircraft flying.  GDS defines and deploys the supply chain between production and sustainment using a Consumption Based Material Replenishment (CBMR) model that improves speed, synchronization and operating efficiency across the value chain.

Knowing the joint capacity and the repair capacity needed for each asset and holding the supply base accountable through time, is going to allow F-35 to have a more predictable sorting generation rate, more predictable reliability.  Over 80% of F-35’s suppliers will be on a performance based contracts and held accountable for their reliabilities and their impact on overall aircraft availability.

The capability to link all of the production suppliers into the world of sustainment by aggregating the demands and ensuring that the capacity of the industrial base is fundamental to the program.  For example, if a supplier will not have sufficient capacity, F-35 will setup up capacity and redundancy through second and third sources to support the predicted activity to support the global fleet. We know the capacity needs and the available capacity ahead of time, we’re able to plan for it, and we’re able to provide the appropriate support level for the need.

A crucial component of the overall supply system is bringing those demands together: we need to do that capacity planning and right size for the future to keep the industrial base healthy but also right sized, so that we can have the proper affordability.

SLD: Another key aspect for containing cost and enhancing reliability is the commonality across the services and the coalition partners in supporting a family of aircraft.  Could you speak to that issue?

Kimberly Gavaletz: One of the key drivers of operational costs is supporting multiple aircraft types in operations. If you think about the 13 services that are now part of the F-35 program across the original 9 F-35 partner nations, you amortize cost across the services and nations. So instead of building configured solutions for a variety of services and aircraft, you are shaping common manufacturing AND sustainment and supply solutions for a family of aircraft, and spreading around the costs.

SLD: A final question focusing upon performance-based logistics.  For some critics, PBL is a bad concept, but the F-35 sustainment approach really has been built around a global supply chain focus, which has used PBL as a shaping function to shape cost containment.  Could you comment on the role of PBL within the global sustainment approach?

Kimberly Gavaletz: Because the aircraft has a common configuration across the three F-35 variants and because F-35 has developed a manufacturing approach with multiple sources built from the ground up, F-35 has built in a common global sustainment approach.  This common sustainment approach allows competition within the supply base and ensures security of supply.  We can supply multiple national aircraft in deployed operations from diverse suppliers.  But these suppliers are all being measured by performance-based measures.  This allows us to monitor the overall supply chain to ensure its health as well as its ability to supply the diverse customer base with best value capabilities and ensure that warfighter outcomes of aircraft availability and sortie generation are achieved.  Take away PBL, and you are left with supply chain competition without effective measurement techniques to ensure best value and ultimate success of providing outcomes aligned with ongoing warfighter requirements.

Another key consideration is that because of the way the aircraft is manufactured and maintained, and how suppliers are plugged into the overall system,  each F-35 customer is not just learning about their fleet of aircraft.  Each customer and supplier learns from the whole global fleet of F-35 aircraft; F-35 users and suppliers  are able to look across all the data with us and better position themselves and learn to better support the aircraft.

Because the supplier is on a performance-based contract, they are watching their supply around the world and how it’s working. And also we, at that same point, are able to look at the problem fleet wide to determine if a pull is starting to happen from a different perspective or from an environment where something is happening that’s causing things to degrade. And it doesn’t have to be all just buying more parts, at times it can be a maintainer issue, it can be a training issue, it can be a configuration issue.

With the digital environment, as soon as a problem report is in the system, it goes all the way back to our sustaining engineering organization. Digital technology has enabled that maintainer in the field to have technical reach back, all the way back to the OEM’s, both  F-35 sustainment and the suppliers that designed the aircraft. All of this information better focuses the need for future modifications of the aircraft, the supply chain and the PBL approach.

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*** Posted on June 29th, 2010

Afghan Narcoterrorism Persists

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Dr. Richard Weitz


By Dr. Richard Weitz

Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at the Hudson Institute, Richard has joined SLD as a regular contributor: his current research includes regional security developments relating to Europe, Eurasia, and East Asia as well as U.S. foreign, defense, homeland security, and WMD nonproliferation policies.








One issue that has drawn less attention at this month’s congressional hearings on the Afghanistan War than in previous years is the narcotics dimension of the conflict. According to United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Afghanistan supplies approximately 90 percent of the world’s consumption of opium—up from 70% in 2000 and 52% a decade earlier [1].

Although output dropped considerably in early 2001, when the then Taliban-led Afghan government enforced a ban on opium poppy cultivation to avoid UN sanctions, the chaos following the Taliban’s overthrow reversed this progress. As a result, Afghanistan has become the world’s largest heroin producing and trafficking country.

The illicit manufacture and distribution of drugs currently accounts for an amazingly large share (perhaps one-third) of Afghanistan’s economy. According to the UNODC, Afghan-based opiates now kill more people than any other narcotic in the world, approximately 100,000 people annually. The number of people who die from heroin use in NATO countries each year is more than 10,000, or five times greater than all the NATO troops who have died in Afghanistan since coalition began military operations there in October 2010. The Russian government estimates that more of its citizens die from using Afghan-based heroin every few months than perished during the decade-long Soviet military occupation of Afghanistan during the Reagan years.

Determining the precise quantity of narcotics exports from Afghanistan is difficult but the UNODC estimates it to be around 3,500 tons per year. The primary routes run through Iran to Turkey and Western Europe; through Pakistan to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; and through Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan to Russia.

While satellites can identify areas of opium cultivation, tracking the movement of processed opiates is much more difficult. Analysts can only approximately estimate the aggregate size of narcotics flows from intercepted drug shipments. Law enforcement officials also have incentives to exaggerate the success of their counternarcotics efforts.

Figure 1 Global Potential Opium Production, 1980-2009, World Drug Report, 2010Source: Global Potential Opium Production, 1980-2009, World Drug Report, 2010, page 38

Nevertheless, the Afghan drug trade clearly represents a major international problem. Neighboring countries complain about the flow of drugs into and through their territories, which facilitates local narcotics consumption and corrupts their law enforcement personnel. Dealers throughout Europe and Asia rely on Afghan supplies of opium and heroin to satisfy local demand for these illicit drugs.

Improvements in local narcotics manufacturing technologies have resulted in a large amount of the country’s raw opium being converted inside Afghanistan into heroin and morphine base, which reduces its bulk tenfold and facilitates its movement through transnational narcotics markets. Illicit trafficking of narcotic “precursors”—substances like Ephedrine that are essential for the manufacture of certain illegal drugs and that must often be imported into Afghanistan – is also common.

Afghans also suffer from the drug trade. The narcotics industry is worsening many of Afghanistan’s other serious economic, political, and security problems, including its relations with neighboring countries. Illicit drug trafficking is draining resources away from legitimate economic activity and, by encouraging corruption and other fraudulent practices, undermining Afghan government institutions. Many Afghans are addicted to opium, while the pervasive narcotics industry spreads crime and corruption throughout the country.

The UNODC estimates that Afghanistan currently produces almost twice as much opium as is consumed worldwide. The UN believes addiction rates among Afghans have soared in recent years, with serious long-term health, economic, social, and security consequences.

There are only a few areas in the country where narcotics use is rare. Afghanistan’s poor health care and limited number of drug treatment facilities exacerbate this problem.

Of the $65 billion in revenue generated by the global heroin market, only a small portion goes to the Afghan poppy growers.

Most of the illicit profits go to those who convert the poppy into drugs, move them to foreign countries, or sell the narcotics to users. But the UNODC estimates that the Taliban insurgents derive several hundred million dollars annually from taxing opium growers as well as charging fees to protect the production and transit of narcotics and their chemical precursors through guerilla-controlled territory. They then use this revenue to purchase weapons, pay salaries, and bribe corrupt officials.

The UNODC also finds a correlation between the lack of Afghan government control of a province and its opium production, with the highest output occurring in the regions with the least security. At present, almost all the opium production occurs in six southern and western provinces of Helmand, Farah, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Day Kundi and Badghis – the same regions that have become strongholds of the Taliban insurgency. The U.S. military calculates that the Taliban and al-Qaeda receive up to 40 percent of their funding from the drug trade, while the UN estimates the figure to be closer to 60 percent. By encouraging narcotics trafficking and other illegal activities, moreover, the Taliban make the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai and his foreign backers appear weak and ineffective.

The insurgency also indirectly stimulates drug trafficking by impeding anti-narcotics efforts in the affected regions. For example, eradication teams cannot travel safely through contested provinces. In addition, the fighting disrupts programs to encourage farmers to cultivate alternative crops or to prevent smuggling into neighboring countries. Besides the direct narcotics-terrorism nexus, Afghan drug trafficking has reinforced the power of local warlords and criminal organizations at the expense of the already weak Karzai government.

Source: Northern and Balkan Routes, World Drug Trade Report, 2010, page 22

The Russian, Chinese, and Central Asian governments have expressed much concern about NATO’s inability to counter narcotics trafficking from Afghanistan. Russian officials estimate that some 30,000 Russians die yearly from using Afghan-based heroin—either through drug overdoses or through contracting AIDS from contaminated needles. The porous nature of the post-Soviet borders has made it easy for Afghan drug traffickers to move their product through Central Asia and northward into Russia. According to the UN, the Central Asian authorities are seizing only around 5% of the estimated 90 tons of heroin that enters their territory. While traditionally most of this flow moves on to Russia, Central Asians abuse the drugs too.

Although China does not lie along this “Northern Route,” new narcotics trafficking routes have developed from Afghanistan through Pakistan and Central Asia into China. According to the Chinese government, the narcotics smuggled into China through this conduit have more than offset the decline in imports from the Golden Triangle. The borders between Afghanistan and Pakistan are also easily crossed by the Pashtun tribesmen living on both sides of the frontier as well as others enjoy local protection. Given these conditions, the UNDOC warns: 

Figure 3 Global Heroin Flows, World Drug Report, 2010Source: Global Heroin Flows, World Drug Report, 2010, page 45

The most sinister development yet is taking shape outside Afghanistan. Drugs are funding insurgency in Central Asia where the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Islamic Party of Turkestan, the East Turkistan Liberation Organization and other extremist groups are also profiting from the trade. The Silk Route, turned into a heroin route, is carving out a path of death and violence through one of the world’s most strategic, yet volatile regions. The perfect storm of drugs, crime and insurgency that has swirled around the Afghanistan/Pakistan border for years, is heading for Central Asia.

Insofar as the reports about competition between drug dealers precipitating the latest fighting in Kyrgyzstan are accurate, this tempest may have already have occurred.

Since NATO took over command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in 2002, Western governments and their Afghan partners, supported by various multinational organizations, have employed a strategy involving five elements whose relative weight have varied over time: (1) conducting an effective public information campaign; (2) offering opium farmers alternative livelihood opportunities that would redirect them into legal employment activities; (3) enhancing the capacity of Afghan law enforcement agencies to prosecute major narcotraffickers through their imprisonment or extradition; (4) directly eradicating opium poppy crops; and (5) interdicting the flow of narcotics within and beyond Afghanistan.

NATO military commanders have traditionally seen their prime responsibility as combating the Taliban insurgency rather than curbing local narcotics trafficking. They have generally avoided using their scarce combat troops in direct support of the counternarcotics campaign, typically restricting their role to providing training and logistical support to Afghan security personnel in counternarcotics and counterinsurgency issues. NATO military commanders must work with local Afghan leaders to obtain intelligence and other support against the Taliban insurgents. The commanders are therefore unenthusiastic about aggressive counternarcotics activities that alienate these very leaders, who often profit from drug trafficking, as well as complicate their “hearts and mind” campaign to win over the fence-sitting population to their side.

Critics label this approach as “sequencing”—relegating a major and sustained effort to eliminate Afghan narcotics production until after the military situation had stabilized, rather than treating the drugs issue as an integral part of the region’s insurgency and terrorist problem. They believe that the overlap between the Taliban and the drug traffickers means that the counterinsurgency and counternarcotics campaigns in Afghanistan are mutually reinforcing because the military forces involved in both operations can exploit synergies by sharing resources and intelligence.

From this perspective, vigorously cracking down on the Taliban insurgents will also mitigate Afghanistan’s narcotics problem. Besides directly fighting Taliban guerrillas, NATO forces have undertaken a variety of civic action programs that could indirectly reduce drug cultivation by providing alternative sources of employment. In addition, the alliance’s efforts to strengthen the powers of the Kabul government enhance the influence of its law enforcement and other anti-narcotics agencies.

Source: Northern and Balkan Routes, World Drug Trade Report, 2010, page 54

The NATO-Afghan counternarcotics efforts are generally considered a failure. While about one-quarter of Afghan opium shipments are intercepted, only 2 percent of those interdictions occur within Afghanistan itself. The comparable interdiction rate for Colombia is about 20 percent. Seizing raw opium before it reaches heroin labs for processing is perhaps a more difficult challenge since the material is easy to store and moves through Central Asia via well-funded and entrenched trafficking networks. But much of the problem is due to the weaker state of Afghan public institutions and the widespread corruption in the country, with even high officials rumored to be involved in the drug trade. International efforts to make the Afghan counternarcotics police and the Afghan judicial system more effective have achieved minimal progress.

In addition, NATO and Afghan authorities have been trying for years to provide financial assistance to farmers for not growing the plants and instead harvest wheat, cotton, or vegetables. This strategy has had some success in reducing the overall opium production in Afghanistan’s northern provinces, but the southern provinces have made up for the lower northern yield with a spike in their own production. Particularly in the south, the lack of viable livelihoods for many Afghans has made the high profit cultivation of poppy seeds the only option for many Afghan farmers to provide for their families. Growing crops such as wheat or cotton cannot produce nearly as much profit for an Afghan farmer.

Such a disparity in potential revenue coupled with the high levels of poverty in Afghanistan has made cultivating opium a logical economic choice for farmers. While the NATO and Afghan governments have made pledges of extended funding and support for counternarcotics efforts, the amount of money that could potentially reach many farmers pales in comparison to the potential profits in illegally growing poppies.

The simultaneous resurgence of the Afghan narcotics industry and the Taliban has aggravated international tensions over how to manage the post-conflict reconstruction process in Afghanistan. Several multinational organizations and foreign countries are currently undertaking major initiatives to suppress Afghan drug trafficking. Until relative peace returns to Afghanistan or a technological fix appears, the challenge now is to integrate these diverse counternarcotics programs more comprehensively, especially by overcoming the chasm between the Western and Eurasian governments and affiliated multinational institutions, to avoid wasted resources and unnecessary frictions.

Strengthening security along the Tajik-Afghan border might provide a place to commence any joint projects since international and institutional zones of interest overlap there. Tajikistan is a member of the Moscow-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Beijing-leaning Shanghai Cooperation Organization, while NATO enjoys overflight rights over Tajikistan in support of coalition operations in Afghanistan and, like the Russian government, has been providing technical assistance to Tajikistan’s border guards and interior ministry.

Footnotes:

[1] United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2010

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***Posted on June 29th, 2010

Managing Chaos Texas-Style (Part I)

Posted on | by SysAdmin

By Steve Nerheim

As the USCG participates in the current challenging Gulf oil spill crisis, the danger of the tropical storm season coming upon us reminds us that crises can be telescoped.  In this two part article by Steve Nerheim, the USCG approach to partnering in crisis management is analyzed from the vantage point of dealing with Hurricane Ike in 2008. Steve Nerheim has been Director of VTS Houston/Galveston and a member of the Greater Galveston Bay Port Coordination Team since 2005. His previous experience was as a U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer, principally in Destroyers. While on active duty he was additionally qualified and designated as an Underwater Warfare Specialist and a Joint Specialty Officer.

***

“Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
When astronaut James Lovell, Jr. spoke those words in April 1970 the Nation’s attention quickly focused upon the plight of Apollo-13 and its three man crew. Teams of NASA specialists and subject matter experts worked around the clock to assist the endangered astronauts in effecting a safe return to Earth. This is a great story of successful teamwork in defiance of all odds, and deserves remembering and retelling whether you recall the actual events or know the story from Ron Howard’s splendid film.

When Hurricane Ike roared ashore in southeast Texas in September 2008 it carried a fifteen foot storm surge and 100 MPH winds into one of the Nation’s busiest ports and largest petrochemical complex, disrupted regional infrastructure, decimated Galveston Island, the Bolivar Peninsula and other low lying areas, damaged or destroyed 58% of the aids to navigation along the Houston Ship Channel, filled a major stretch of the Gulf Intracoastal Canal with debris and shoals, damaged or destroyed several key Coast Guard facilities, and created over two billion dollars in economic impact to the major ports of the Sector Houston-Galveston AOR.

Figure 1 Hurricane Ike Seawall Credit: USCG Atlantic Command

Houston had a problem. But it also had a solution.

Origin and maturation of the Port Coordination Team
Houston-Galveston’s Port Coordination team has its roots in the Port Emergency Committee (PEC) established following the December 21, 1992 collision between UTV Freemont and M/V Jurai Delmantinac. As originally constituted the PEC included industry representatives from the West Gulf Maritime Association, local Pilot’s Associations, American Waterways Operators/ Texas Waterways Operators, oil refiners, chemical refiners, Port Authorities, and liquid terminals in addition to the USCG and Army Corps of Engineers. The PEC expanded over time to include local government offices of emergency management and a broader cross-section of industry, and served the USCG and maritime stakeholders well. Despite its effectiveness, like many growing committees, it was becoming unwieldy.

Then-Commander Tom Marian, the penultimate Commanding Officer of Vessel Traffic Service Houston/Galveston, gave the Port Coordination Team its present form and function by capturing, formalizing, and documenting procedures in a “PCT Protocol.” Commander Marian’s protocol, developed and refined between 2002 and 2005, was originally oriented upon post-September 11 port security issues to establishing effective procedures for setting MARSEC 2 and 3 conditions. The PCT’s expanded application was “test driven” during a challenging 2003-04 fog season and the Christmas Eve 2003 MARSEC 2 surge ops on the HSC. These test-drives validated many concepts and proved the PCT’s utility in managing the resumption of commerce within the MTS following a prolonged closure or significant disruption. That experience also contributed to working out procedural “bugs” and to fine tuning the team’s composition. A number of passionate discussions on team membership/composition ensued, but in the end it was recognized that a town hall meeting approach, open to the entire general stakeholder community, would be unworkable. This led to a representative rather that democratic approach and a compact, cohesive Port Coordination Team made up of one delegate from each of our several port stakeholder constituencies.

The Port Coordination Team continued to evolve, grow, and mature through experience with fog closures and heavy weather disruptions, building habitual relationships and deepening the mutual trust and confidence between and among participants along the way. Importantly, the team’s personification­ of collaborative interdependence and its well-deserved reputation for success ensured that it held the complete trust and garnered the full support of a succession Sector Commanders and Captains of the Port. That trust and support was essential when the PCT faced its sternest test to date – Hurricane Ike.

Figure 2 Hurricane Ike (Credit Photo: http://www.jeffsweather.com/archives/2008/09/hurricane_ike_s.html)

PCT Concept of Operations
The mature PCT includes representatives of the entire spectrum of local martime interests and includes:

  • Port of Houston Authority
  • Port of Texas City
  • Port of Galveston
  • Port of Freeport
  • Offshore Port/Gulfport (Lightering)
  • Gulf Intercoastal Canal Association (Towing)
  • West Gulf Maritime Association
  • Houston Pilots
  • Galveston-Texas City Pilots
  • Brazos (Freeport) Pilots
  • Oil Refiners
  • Oil Terminals
  • Chemical Carriers
  • Chemical Facilities
  • Non-VTS users (recreational/fishing)
  • Harbor Tugs
  • NOAA (Navigational Response Team)
  • NOAA (National Weather Service)
  • Army Corps of Engineers
  • USCG Waterways Management (Sector and MSU)
  • USCG Vessel Traffic Service
  • USCG Sector Commander (or representative)

In heavy weather situations, the PCT does not work alone in restoring commerce to the MTS. It is closely partnered with, and coordinates closely and effectively with, the Texas Joint Hurricane Response Team (TJHRT). The TJHRT is an Army Corps of Engineers Galveston District-led group focused upon waterway conditions and includes representatives from NOAA, local pilots associations, towing industry partners, and USCG Waterways Management (WWM)/Aids to Navigation (AtoN)/Vessel Traffice Service (VTS) personnel.

With the foregoing history, form, concept, and partnerships laid out, a key question (indeed, the entire rationale for this article) remains:  “How does it work?”  With Hurricane Ike providing context another story of successful team work against all odds should help.

Ike was not our first heavy weather of the 2008 season, but while the storm was still churning east of Cuba, the Greater Galveston Bay Port Coordination Team convened to advise and inform the USCG Sector Commander/Captain of the Port, and to implement/operationalize his guidance and directives. Captain William J. Diehl, the Sector Commander and Captain of the Port has developed and shared with his local port partners and maritime stakeholders a four phase plan for heavy weather operations:

  • Get ready to “Hunker Down.”
  • Post-landfall Emergency Response/SAR.
  • Post-landfall “Assess the Mess.”
  • Prioritize and “Go to Work.”

The PCT’s remit was but one line of operations within the complexity of the larger Sector Commander’s Campaign Plan, but with a full appreciation of the commander’s intent the it conducted its own operations in four similar phases, tied to the approach of heavy weather and the escalating Port Conditions, and very broadly described by their end-states as:

  • Empty the Port.
  • Secure the Port.
  • Validate the Port.
  • Reopen the Port.

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***Posted on June 29th, 2010

Crafting a Services Approach: A Perspective from Airbus Military

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As part of the Trade Media briefing in Spain in May 2010, a senior representative for Airbus Military provided an overview of different approaches to services which, we thought, would be very useful for readers of SLD, notably as the US debates the future of programs such as performance-based logistics.  Richard Thompson, Senior Vice President for customer services also provided an understanding of where the current Airbus Military business efforts fit within these conceptual approaches.

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Different Approaches to Services
In terms of concepts that we are developing, we’re moving from what has been for the last year’s traditional product support, all the usual things that you associate with a traditional product support—the MRO, the technical support, the technical publications, configuration management, continuous air worthiness support for the fleet, training services, spares and material support—we also are moving into helping our customers with urgent operational requirements, modifications, upgrades, role changes of aircraft once they are in service, et cetera—those kind of support services, and what we called our FISS, which is the Full In-Service support concept, which is effectively a performance-based logistic support service on a power by the hour type—on a flight/hour service type arrangement, where we wrap up a whole series of services into a single contract that guarantees the support the customer requires over a period of years, and he pays accordingly to the number of flight hours that he flies.

Moving on to what we call Integrated Mission Support Services, …. we add other services which get a lot closer to the actual operation of the customer, where we actually help the customer in delivering his mission and operating his aircraft.

And that’s where we can climb in the value-chain and access new sources of funding.  And, again, win/win situation: customer is happy—he can concentrate in actually flying his mission in doing what he does best, his core activity; and we increasingly fill in other services that traditionally have been the role of customers, but which they are increasingly outsourcing.

Typical example of that, the “jewel in the crown,” if you like, of that type of service provision is, of course, the FSTA contract in United Kingdom, where the customer doesn’t even own the assets.  He doesn’t own anything…..

And quite apart from the fact that it is a PFI, that’s almost immaterial;  it’s how the service is delivered at the end of the day, and that’s, of course, the prime responsibility of Air Tanker Services, but we are just behind them in that concept.  But that concept, of course, is a very large and very complex affair, but it doesn’t have to be, of course.  But the concept itself can be exported to other type of solutions, and that’s what we’re currently engaged in talking to some of our smaller customers that did not have the wherewithal or the infrastructure to provide and maintain fleets operating, how we can actually step into those shoes and do that for them. And so that what they contract for, in fact, is mission success.

The traditional support, where we have about 60% of the revenue is indeed in material support—the supply chain.  And it’s not just proprietary parts in our business; it’s vendor material as well from our suppliers.

And the beauty is that, of course, we are a one-stop shop; customers come to us and they don’t have to deal with myriad of suppliers.  They know that we hold the stocks, that we can provide them the rapid turnarounds and the sort of support that they need.  But 40% of that traditional support usually in terms of revenue is things other than material support: technical support, engineering and training services.

With the FISS concept, we guarantee the delivery of those elements detailed there to our customers, and we develop key performance indicators with our customers as part of negotiating the contracts with them, and we are measured and paid in accordance to our ability to deliver against those KPIs.  And so the idea there is to keep the customer’s fleet flying; the more hours he flies, the more we get paid, the more he flies, the happier he is.

And finally, the concept of integrated mission support services, where the customer is effectively contracting for availability and mission success.  And the idea here is that we try to be as flexible as we possibly can in meeting our customers requirements.

The idea behind the FISS contract, of course, is the customer can budget a lot better over a number of years, and we take into account using some fairly sophisticated tools what the peaks and troughs throughout the life of an aircraft in service will be, and we can average that out and way ahead, for many years in advance, we can actually enter into a formula, whereby the customer will know over a period of years exactly how much he’s got to budget for, in order to keep that fleet of aircraft flying.  And that’s the beauty of the concept, as far as the customer is concerned.

As far as we’re concerned, we are guaranteed long-term support for a customer and we can budget ourselves and invest ourselves and plan in the long term.

…. So, the advantages, obviously: fixed budgeting, no risk, no need to come back and worry about repeat contracts for spares and repairs on a per-even item, which is usually quite complicated and you haven’t got time, when you need something, to start entering into terms and conditions of how it might be done.  Stock-levels are optimized to a fleet usage, contract obviously has guarantees in it: the customer knows that if we don’t perform, he has a contractual tool in his hand that enables him to take action against us and force us to perform.  We flow those terms down, obviously, into our supply base, so the risks are shared, and everybody’s incentivized and motivated to deliver best support.  The maintenance program, of course, is put in place from the very beginning that monitors and continuously monitors the fleet so that we get feedback from our customers, as well, on a continuous basis, so that we can refine those models and our predictive models get better all the time.  We can optimize our maintenance models that way, and the customer can focus, then, on, what is its core activity, which is the mission success, and we fill in the rest.

Examples of the Military Airbus Effort
We’re getting ready, we’re ramping up to deliver the first of the MRTT’s, the KC30A to Australia, our launch customer, and I’ve recently just come back from Brisbane and the RAAF base there in Amberley and the facilities are looking good.  They’re all ready to go—33 squadron all geared up anxiously waiting for the first plane to arrive and they’re all fired up.  The DMO people who are at the base who represent the customer, the end user, 33 squadron and Qantas Defense Services with whom a couple of weeks ago we signed the contract which is effectively a through-life support agreement for the next 22 years.  QDS will be the prime contractor delivering that through-life support in front of the customer.  They have their offices there in Amberley as well and they’re all ready to go and we will be supporting them locally in Australia through our subsidiary, Australian Aerospace, who will be doing some specific work packages on behalf of QDS and also remotely back from here in Madrid with all our technical support and other services that we will provide QDS.

We’ve hit a major, major milestone in the sense that we’ve actually started delivering some real hardware to the Australian Airforce—the first piece of hardware that we’ve actually delivered, the first of some 500 pieces of support—ground support and test equipment, and the first of some 4,000 spare items that we will be delivering to the Commonwealth over the next few months.  It’s a complex process but we’ve put it to the test, we’ve done the first deliveries and it all works.  And so, good news, and everybody’s keen, ready to go.

We will also be placing there—there will be a total of six field reps, of which two will be ours.  We will be placing those two field reps at Amberley over a three year period to ensure a smooth entry into service.

So that’s MRTT for Australia, equally, obviously not the same degree of progress or advancement, because Australia is our first customer, but we have met all contractual milestones of the two primary subcontracts that we have with Air Tanker Services in the UK.  We’re obviously principle share-holder as you know, of Air Tanker Services.  The two primary subcontracts, which we are responsible for are for the green aircraft and the supplementary type certificate elements of the military conversion, and we are up to speed and ramping up there as well, in terms of supporting that entry into service.  ITS, as most of you know, on FSTA is in September of 2011.  Also, advanced planning is in place to support the entry to service of the Royal Saudi Airforce and the UAE MRTT as well.

A400Ms—A400M is a bit further away, obviously, but the magnitude of the task ahead and the number of things that we have to get ready with the first customer, the French Air Force and the United Kingdom joining France in a joint approach to contracting for in-service support.  They are the first customers and a lot of activity at the moment going on in terms of building the bricks that we’re then going to use to put together in different ways, different combinations, the basic elements of in-service support for our different customers.  And as I said, the first ones there are France and the UK.  It’ll be a single, joint contract.  Obviously they will have different timetables and milestones inside those contracts to take account of the actual different entry into service dates between the French Air Force and the Royal Air Force.  But the elements will be very similar, and the concept, the philosophy behind the in-service support will be very similar for both nations.

Global presence around the world—we have in all of those countries shown and in fact in other places, either service centers, field representatives of customer support representatives providing our customers around the world with the contact point—first point of contact—entry into our customer and the reach-back into our organizations here in Madrid to support our customers around the world…..

And some relevant figures on a per-year basis, taking last year as an example, some 40 aircraft came through our maintenance facilities, either our MRO operation in San Pablo in Seville, or maintenance centers around the world.  In terms of component repair management, some 3,800 customer repair orders, and we subcontract to some 120 repair centers around the world.  Request for quotations and line items, over 3,000 and 46,000 line items.

And in terms of turning those into purchase orders, we actually received some 3,000 purchase orders covering some 40,000 line items.  In terms of warehouse movements, some 42,000 delivery line items last year.  In terms of AOG—that’s material AOG—that’s when an aircraft is on the ground for lack of a spare part, and the customer needs a rapid response—some 1,700 requests from around the world.  Ands 98% of those were delivered within 24 hours.

And that covers just—not only proprietary parts, as I mentioned, but also vendor items from all of our supply base.  Some 1,825 hours of course-ware were developed.  That was not just the period of last year.  That was the period up to 2008.  But last year we cycled some 400 students through our training center in Seville.  And in terms of technical publications—yes, unfortunately, many of our customers still require us to deliver printed technical publications—some 3,800,000 pages, but also increasingly moving to electronic media with our tech pubs as well.  And, of course, in the case of the A400M, it’ll be all electronic, no paper at all.

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*** Posted on June 29th, 2010

Shaping the Evolving Acquisition Work Force

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In early May, SLD sat down with retiring (in only one sense of the word) Frank Anderson, President of the Defense Acquisition University till a few weeks ago.  Brigadier General Frank J. Anderson (Retired) is an articulate and persuasive advocate for innovation in shaping the future human capital strategy within DOD.  General Anderson wore dual hats as the head of the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and the head of the Pentagon’s Office of Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (OSD AT&L) effort to shape a strategic plan for the management of the acquisition workforce.  General Anderson laid out his assessment of the way ahead in re-shaping the acquisition workforce as well as discussing new ways to shape learning for that workforce.

The interview was conducted shortly before his retirement.  He previously served as Commandant of the Defense Systems Management College, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Contracting , and Air Force Competition Advocate General . He also served as the first chairman of the Federal Iner-agency Working Group for Alternate Dispute Resolution . He was recognised by Attorney General Janet Reno for his leadership of the Federal ADR Working Group . He was selected for the Who’s Who in America for 2000 and has been selected to receive this years National Contract Management Association’s National Achievement Award.

He has served as a major weapon system program director , project group manager, director of contracting for a major acquisition center, commander of a plant representative office, and warranted contracting officer. He is Level III certified in Program Management and Contracting.

General Anderson is a graduate of the Defense Systems Management College, Air Command Staff College, Industrial College of the Armed Forces and has a masters and bachelors degree (Cum Laude) in Business. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the National Contract Management Association , the Washington Area Corporate University Consortium, and is a Trustee for the Contract Management Institute.


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SLD: During your time at Defense Acquisition University, you have been shaping a virtual revolution in training  in two senses.  You have used the virtual world of the web as a cornerstone capability and, in turn, have used those tool sets to change the overall training infrastructure for the acquisition workforce.  Could you explain about the approach?

General Anderson: We want to enable and empower the workforce that we’re putting in place for tomorrow to not only be better than the workforce today, but to create an environment so that when they need a knowledge asset, they can easily access it. These are terms of art that we’re starting to use in relation with what we think the workplace or learning environment will be as we go forward. We want to deliver learning resources when a person needs it. What we have learned over time is the moment people tend to learn the most is when they’re trying to do something and when they’re really focused – when they’re actually really focused on that learning outcome. At that point in time, if we can deliver learning resource for that time “when I’m there working a source collection and I’ve gone through source selection training, but I didn’t use it right away; so now two years later, I’m on a source selection team, I know in general how to do it but I really need to refresh my knowledge”. The users will have gone through a resident training course. But now it becomes how do we use learning resources as performance support? My goal is to help a person excel at the job at hand.

SLD: And, of course, if you can have it structured so that, linking my experience with your tool set, I can give you feedback and modifies those tools.

General Anderson: Absolutely. So we need to be in a position where we can continuously update, where you know that idea of learning is not a static one-time operation. The idea of learning is in fact a dynamic process which you have to continuously update, and that’s a big part of what we’re trying to change with the certification structure that we’ve put in place.

SLD:    You’re going from essentially “permanently” structured learning process to one that is a lot more dynamic and fluid. So you try and measure skill sets rather than just perhaps testing information, which you are passing on through a structured course.

General Anderson: Right. You used a key term. We’re trying to deliver capabilities that are important to improve acquisition outcomes. It’s not about a static certification mode, and the term of art that we’re using is the ability to deliver learning resources at the individual employee’s point of need.

We’ve accepted the fact that to have a dynamic learning environment there is no theory. So when a person goes through certification training, that’s good for getting the basics, but there is no theory. Policies will change, consideration of the program they are working on will be different, i.e. when they get on the job, what they need to do know, understand, and be able to do, is what we have to help them address:  we do that by having learning resources that they can get to at their learning point of need.

Instead of being captured by a structure that’s shaped only by when we have a classroom, when we have an instructor, and we can schedule resources to get that person out of the workplace into the classroom environment. We’re also shaping a series of resources that’s not just focused on an individual’s acquiring skills.

We are doing what we’re calling “intact team training.” This is training where we will work as a team on a program objective program mission. So there is a different dynamic between myself as a student understanding the rules, regulations, and processes for doing engineering, and the Department of Defense, or the federal government, or as a team member doing contracting.  For example, how do I have to play as a member of a team working on the C-17 versus the F-22? We are shaping training so we can go work with the appropriate team. What are your skill gaps? What are the needs specific to that team operation?

SLD:    So presumably you have to have a core skill set training, basic tool sense for your acquisition role?

General Anderson: Right. Functional training. We have a huge capability to deliver learning resources. And by that I’m talking about policies and procedures; we are trying to shape a learning environment where everybody will know everything that they need to know at the point they need to know it.

So how does that work? The courses that we’re building now in the new contracting course, as well as the new basic fundamental course that was deployed in April, are a resident course, but uses web tools. Although it’s a resident course they operate in the classroom on their computers. They come and everybody has a laptop. The reason we want to do that is we want all the people going back to the field to have had exposure to going to the websites that we have available and that will provide supporting tools to an employee in the field.

SLD: Are you getting good support for this effort from the Congress and Administration?

General Anderson: We have had excellent support from the Congress. In fact, many of the things that we’re currently doing, we would not be doing but for the support and the direction that we’ve received from them.  We’ve had outstanding support. The Congress has been very active in the human capital space since about 2006. And the direction and vision that they’ve had for improving the acquisition workforce has been key to many of the initiatives that we have in place.

What we’ve done with training have been driven primarily by the team that we have here and excellent support from DOD leadership. So when you go look at my time here, I have really worked with several leaders within various administrations, but because we have had a strategic vision and direction, whether Republican or Democrat, we have had broad support for what we’re trying to do. So we have benefited greatly from stability of mission and direction, as well as  stability of the leadership team that we have in place, and a long term, positive relationship with the Hill.

SLD: One of the major challenges in reshaping the acquisition workforce is that as you hire you loose a significant cadre of experienced people.  How are you dealing with that challenge?

General Anderson:  We have worked very hard to shape a data-driven understanding of the detailed nature of our acquisition workforce.  We have built data beyond broad characterizations of the folks in the workforce, and have shaped an understanding of the specific skill sets which folks possess.  We then can make judgments on the age cohorts we have within the acquisition work force, which retiring capabilities we need to seek to retain while we shape the new workforce, and which new workers have which skill sets to meet current and emerging acquisition needs.

Dr. Carter recently signed out a document on the DOD human capital strategic plan, which was built around the database, which we have crafted. We have a good strategy in place of where we want to go and this is not a document that we just worked in isolation. This document has been in evolution for almost two years.

SLD: Could you provide some further understanding with regard to how you have broken out the workforce into age cohorts and core competencies?

General Anderson: We break the workforce into three core hard groups. We do analysis with regard to three categories:  future, mid-career and senior. This helps us understand when various functional communities are most apt to retire.

It will also help us to develop targeted retention strategies that are not peanut butter spreads that you often see. In  2009 the acquisition workforce hired approximately 15,000 people. We lost approximately 8,000, which represents a net gain of about 7,000 people. And that’s new hires and replenishment hires. The growth strategy we added increased in size about 2,000 people.

So, as we understand the dynamics, we’re getting smarter and we will be smarter next year than we are this year. We will continue to grow, so it’s an evolving process. But the good news is we have the right foundation in place. That’s hiring and recruiting.

The learning piece we set up so that we can connect to people anywhere in the world:  seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day at they’re learning point of need. They’re no longer depending on us just to schedule a classroom. We do that and we’re very good at it. We now have a total learning environment that’s available to support this workforce and they are an evolving set of new web tools that are available for individuals to have more control over their learning environment. And that’s unique.

SLD: How did you develop your web tools?

General Anderson: The Learning Management System (LMS) that we are using was developed internally: we did that because when we were starting the journey, there were so many critics. Our LMS is becoming a standard in the department. Other organizations are starting to use our LMS as well, which allows us to share the cost of ownership across multiple organizations and just not have one organization that’s paying the total cost of an individual solution. That’s a best practice.

What most people don’t know, the largest provider of acquisition training for the federal government is Defense Acquisition University. This is a national asset and not just for the Department of Defense where we leverage the investments made in training here.





SLD:  You’ve mentioned  the transformation of the Defense Acquisition University, and one of the more interesting points you made is how it was basically self-financed.  Can you describe this approach and process?

General Anderson: In 2000 we made a proposal to the senior leadership in response to a tasking from the (then) Under Secretary of Defense Acquisition Technology and Logistics, Dr. Jack Gansler, to re-engineer the learning environment for the acquisition workforce. We went back with a proposal that said there are two strategies for doing this, we can either get new money that will allow us to go do the things that we’re being asked to do, or we can take money out of the existing budget which means that we would draw down training for a period of time and hiring and we would re-purpose and re-use that funding to rethink the learning paradigm for the acquisition workforce.

The direction that we received was to work the program through our internal funding and strategies and we did that. Fundamentally, such a process involved relocating to the acquisition workforce population center in Huntsville, Alabama. We were already at Wright Patterson, San Diego, and other locations where we could reduce travel and per diem dollars. And that money was then reinvested in expanding the learning resources that were available for the community. We were very, very successful in doing this.





SLD:    So  you basically moved from requiring people to come to your stadium to play ball to playing away games, deploying to where the acquisition professionals needed to be and this is a good foundation for the web learning approach that you’ve now taken.

General Anderson: Exactly. What we were able to do by co-locating with the workforce has put us in a position where we can start a very active consulting or mission assistance support program that’s in place and has been very effective to date; we then look at the best way to create an environment so that we could do seven day, twenty-four hour support worldwide. That required a significant investment in our web or “e” presence. Today that is an integral and very big part of the practice. What many people thought is that we were cutting or eliminating resident training in order to grow the “e” practice. We reinvested the funds that were regenerated and today we actually deliver more resident training than we ever had in the history of the Department and the web based presence has been a national resource. Not just for the Department of Defense, but for the entire federal sector, as well as many of our defense contractors.

SLD:    The final question  focuses on the dual hat mission that you’ve done. It’s very good for the nation that you were making this transformation because when the renewed emphasis on human capital investment occurred you were ready to help lead in this effort: could you tell us a little bit about your dual hat effort.

General Anderson: Absolutely. In 2006 Ken Krieg who was then the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition Technology and Logistics gave me the additional role of preparing a strategic plan for the acquisition workforce. There was a lot of legislation that was being passed by the Congress relative to the acquisition workforce. Krieg did not believe we had a strategic view about how successfully to manage the acquisition workforce. He asked me to take on that role and that has been very exciting, very challenging, and it allowed the Department to be well positioned to support Secretary Gates and ATL Secretary Carter in their strategy to grow and improve the acquisition workforce as a part of the new acquisition and reform initiatives.





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*** Posted on June 29th, 2010