The Army’s maintenance depots may have to rapidly ramp up their capacity so they can fix up to 40,000 trucks and combat vehicles that could be returning from Iraq in the next several years.
Most of that work will be done at the Letterkenny Army Depot, Pa., and the Red River Army Depot, Texas, officials said.
The Army is purposely operating both depots below their full capacity in anticipation of a workload surge, said Lt. Gen. James H. Pillsbury, deputy commander of the Army Materiel Command.
At Red River, 30 humvee trucks that return from combat zones are refurbished to “like new” condition each day. Letterkenny now handles about 20 humvees per day. Both depots could double their output if necessary, Pillsbury told reporters at the Association of the U.S. Army winter conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
“We can’t double yet because we don’t have the assets back from the war,” said Pillsbury.
The Army decided to keep 40,000 vehicles in Iraq instead of having them repaired at U.S.-based depots to avoid huge transportation costs. Typically when a unit returns from war, it brings its equipment back. But sometimes the Army chooses to leave the hardware behind and allow the incoming unit to take possession of it. “That’s why the depots are not at full capacity,” said Pillsbury.
Analysts have speculated that the Army may end up turning over its older vehicles to the Iraqi military instead of shipping them back. But those decisions have yet to be made. According to one knowledgeable source, U.S. Central Command officials have requested that the Army leave a large number of trucks behind for the Iraqis, but service leaders have been reluctant to make that commitment until they can be assured that they will have funds to purchase replacement vehicles.
If and when the older vehicles make it back to the United States, the Army’s depots will be ready to fix them, said Pillsbury.
“Our depots today look like modern factories,” he said. “The buildings may be 40 years old but when you walk inside you see industrial tools that rival the most modern ones you see in civilian industry. We’ve spent tens of million of dollars upgrading the machine tools.”
Pillsbury also gave high praise to the depots’ new accounting systems, which allow workers to repair vehicles from multiple customers on a single assembly line while individual customer costs are separately tracked.
“We have different supply chains coming together while making sure the right accounts are billed,” he said.
Despite the upgraded machine tools, some combat vehicles take years to get overhauled because some of their components are custom manufactured and must be ordered years ahead of time.
“The lead time for spare parts in some cases can be measured in years,” Pillsbury said. Delivery of an Abrams tank engine takes 13 months and a Bradley infantry vehicle transmission, 14 months.
At the request of the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, the Army Materiel Command has created “special repair teams” that travel to various posts to fix equipment onsite.
The chief wants AMC to help ease the burden on units’ maintenance crews, said Jeff Dwyer, of the Army Materiel Command. He said the teams already have refurbished one million pieces of equipment this year, including weapons, radios, gas masks and other protective gear.