BG James E. Rogers took command of the JMC in September 2005. Prior to serving as the JMC Commanding General (CG), Rogers was Logistics Operations Division Chief (J-4), U.S. Central Command, MacDill Air Force Base, FL. Rogers took time from his busy schedule during a recent visit to Fort Belvoir, VA, to meet with Army AL&T Magazine editorial staff.
AL&T: The JMC and Program Executive Office Ammunition (PEO Ammo) represent two sides of the Single Manager for Conventional Ammunition (SMCA) triangle. How does the SMCA work and what benefits does it present the Army and DOD for ammunition procurement, production and management?
Rogers: The SMCA provides a means to support common ammunition requirements for all services. I represent the Joint Munitions side of the SMCA mission. As the SMCA principal Field Operating Activity, JMC has the lead on logistics and sustainment concerns to include receipt and issue; storage and distribution; inventory and accountability; safety and security; quality assurance; maintenance; demilitarization (demil) and disposal; transportation; and Operations and Maintenance, Army funding decisions, whereas BG William Phillips, PEO Ammo, has overall responsibility for ammunition life-cycle management with focus on acquisition. Together, we make a very powerful team because we are executing the entire ammunition life cycle. The U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center [ARDEC], which has the research and technology piece, is the third side of the SMCA triangle. With ARDEC, you are really bringing acquisition, logistics and technology [AL&T] together and it pays huge dividends for our Soldiers.
When you talk about the SMCA, you are talking about the centralized management of conventional ammunition, where we obtain the most bang for the buck. Whoever thought of this concept was right on the mark. By maintaining a DOD perspective, there's more benefit and you can reduce the cost in most cases for bulk buys. Wal-Mart� does it very well. We must work on being at least as good as Wal-Mart from a bulk manufacturing and distribution standpoint. We can really reduce our buys if all the services come together.
Everyone needs a 5.56mm bullet for their weapons. Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marine warfighters need it. So we now buy in bulk rather than each service purchasing items on their own and competing against each other for the same resources. That is really the benefit of the SMCA - we bring together the needs of all services and the people who are trained to execute the missions acquisition portion. My folks are trained on how to receive, store, issue and ensure that the ammunition is maintained properly and is delivered to the war fighter whenever and wherever they need it. We also provide logistics support through our Defense Ammunition Center in the form of explosive safety, demil technology, hazard classification, ammunition transportability, ammunition peculiar equipment development, technical assistance and training of DODs ammunition workforce - providing a total quality life cycle program approach. That's the huge benefit of having one service do this mission.
AL&T: How are responsibilities allocated between the JMC and PEO Ammo?
Rogers: That is hard to say because we are so integrated. You must look at the history before PEO Ammo. In the past, all ammunition was consolidated under the U.S. Army Materiel Command [AMC]. After several years reviewing numerous studies, the decision was made to establish a PEO for Ammunition to eet the ammunition experts involved in ensuring that we obtain the most bang for the buck when acquiring munitions. We had acquisition experts at AMC, but breaking it out gave it even more fidelity The JMC provides critical acquisition and logistics support to the project and product managers [PMs] through the resident expertise on our commodity teams, so the PMs are integrated with portions of the JMC to ensure we support them. There are two acquisition centers supporting the ammunition mission. One is part of the U.S. Army Sustainment Command collocated with and providing support to the JMC at Rock Island, IL, and the other is at Picatinny, NJ, assigned to the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command.
So when you ask, where the line is between the JMC and PEO Ammo, I do not think there is a line, and that's a good thing because of what the Joint Munitions and Lethality Life Cycle Management Command [JM&L LCMC] was designed to accomplish. The AL&T communities not only have to work together, but they work so much better if they are tied at the hip. Once you pull in the technology from the research and development [R&D] community, you have a very powerful team because the whole life cycle is integrated, and that is what our PMs are ultimately responsible for. By collocating the key players together, everyone can do their jobs better.
Finally, from a war fighter perspective, there should be no line. The warfighter wants a readiness solution, and it's up to the JM&L LCMC to provide a seamless, integrated AL&T ammunition readiness solution. As is true in most organizations, information exchange can be a challenge as we communicate globally 24/7. The JM&L LCMC recognizes these challenges, and we continue to look for better ways to improve our processes and communicate more effectively to support warfighter ammunition readiness and battlefield requirements.
AL&T: What processes does JMC use to integrate the other services' ammunition acquisition and logistics requirements?
Rogers: The Joint Ordnance Commanders Group [JOCG] is responsible for guiding and influencing conventional ammunition life cycle for all services. JOCG participants are involved in the development and updating of joint SMCA policy and procedures, and they address urgent and important issues relative to insensitive munitions and the services' safety concerns. One JOCG goal is to develop and continuously improve Joint processes and procedures in the best interest of the services' warfighters. I am the Army JOCG member, and BG Phillips chairs it. Also, as part of the requirements piece, JMC, as part of the LCMC, has the distribution and outload requirement for all services.
We have been working numerous continuous improvement and Lean Six Sigma [LSS] actions to aid us in our efforts. We work with the Department of the Army [DA] G-3 equivalents for requirements with all the services to try to ensure that we understand their needs and where they want the ammo positioned in our depots, so we can best support them on outload or training requirements. We also have this Integrated Logistics Strategy program, which is really a complexity study, and above black belt work when you consider it in an LSS-type process.
We are also analyzing whether our network was set up to accomplish the mission of supporting all the services. We have looked at outload and at the network for all the depots, and we are now positioning stocks in coordination with the services' requests. We want to ensure that they have optimal stocks at the best place so they can have it at the best price, as well as the most effective way to ship it out the door should we have an outload requirement. It's a huge project that involves the JMC, the PMs and the other services' requirements people. We ask them, "This is what we think you need based on our analysis and what you've told us. We want to confirm that's true. And this is where we're putting it to best support you. Are you in line with that?" We are at about a 90-percent solution, and we are always improving upon that number.
AL&T: There are two tools that were reported in the August 2004 issue of Army AL&T Magazine that support ammunition readiness: Munitions Readiness Reporting (MRR) and Centralized Ammunition Management (CAM). Can you briefly explain both and tell us what impact they have had on being able to provide the highest quality, ready-to-use ammunition to our Soldiers?
Rogers: The MRR was developed shortly after 9/11 to best determine what ammunition we had out in the world, what condition it was in and whether it supported the warfighter. At that time, the Army did not have an overarching assessment to show leadership how well we were doing our job. Ultimately, our mission is to support the warfighter down to every individual Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine. It sounds simple, but it's very difficult. So the MRR was designed. First, we started with the Army and ensured that the G-3 agreed with it because we knew that once he agreed with it, HQDA would follow. In fact, DA G-3 helped us develop the metrics. Now we have a system all the way down to the individual bullet, the DODIC [DOD Identification Code] level, to show where all our ammo is around the world, what condition it is in and whether or not we are ready to support training and operational requirements.
We have refined the MRR over the years to the point that we literally have one common operational picture [COP] that everyone understands, because everyone is using the same one in the Army. This COP is briefed all the way up to the Army Chief of Staff to show ammo readiness. Everyone can understand it. In addition, we have found a need exists to ensure that we have the stocks positioned correctly to meet Combatant Commanders' [CCDRs'] requirements. We continue to refine the details now, which will allow us to articulate to all CCDRs whether or not we have that ammo in the right place for them, too. MRR is a very powerful tool.
Traditionally, the ammo at our supply depots and the ammo at our Ammunition Supply Points [ASPs] were managed in stovepipes. No single entity was responsible for the entire process or for tracking the ammo stockpile from beginning to end. CAM came about in May 2002 as a Chief of Staff Army Logistics Transformation Task Force initiative from the U.S. Forces Command [FORSCOM] Commander to the JMC Commander. We were critically short of some go-to-war items when the ASPs were holding large quantities in excess of their training requirements. JMC undertook the challenge to manage wholesale and retail ammo as a unified whole, and today we are the Materiel Management Center supporting training and mobilization at 78 CONUS sites. CAM started before LSS came into vogue. The CAM team developed process stream and value stream maps in the early 2000s. They laid out the CAM process of how to ensure that we have visibility of ammo and that everybody has what they need to train and deploy We hold the rest of the stocks and make sure we deliver them to the people who need it. It was one of those fair-sharing logic schemas.
As a result, we were able to manage it better than individual organizations because we now had ASP visibility. Now, we literally manage for FORSCOM, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command [TRADOC] and the National Guard. We have brought all of their management boxes into the JMC where we execute ammunition management for them. That does not negate the fact they still have to tell us what they need to support training, and it goes through those entities to ensure that they are doing the right thing with it for the mission. When they ask us for rounds now, we can actually look into their ASP and tell them whether or not they have enough rounds to do their mission. We can tell them they have a huge stockage of rounds that they have not used and we are going to coordinate with TRADOC, FORSCOM or the National Guard - which is the key to having that coordination - to take some of what they have and move it someplace that really needs it more. So we have been able to optimize where we deliver ammunition, where it is stocked and have visibility of that throughout the United States. Next, we'll tackle the overseas ammo management challenge. We have visibility of OCONUS stocks, but we are working to convince the entities that we can help them better manage their overseas stocks. Overall, these tools have been very successful for us.
JMC manages all the depots, arsenals and ammo plants for the Army. Our people take a lot of pride in what they do. There is only one military person in these depots - the commander; everyone else is civilian. They know their mission in life is to support the Soldier and they go out of their way to do just that. As a good example, McAlester Army Ammunition Plant [MCAAP] in Oklahoma had a huge ice storm in January [2007], yet they had an ammo outload mission required to go overseas for the war effort. Those guys came in when they did not even have power in their own houses! I do not know how they made it to work, quite honestly, because MCAAP was considered a disaster area. But they went in anyway to make sure they filled the railcars for that outload. People are what makes the JMC so powerful.
AL&T: What are the biggest changes you've seen in the ammunition industrial base during your tenure at JMC? How will this be addressed in the future?
Rogers: Because the ammunition industrial base is more than the government, or organic industrial base, we have a huge effort going on to scope the ammunition industrial base. If you look at the whole spectrum of the ammunition industrial base, it is made up of government-owned, governmentoperated [GOGO]; governmentowned, contractor-operated [GOCO]; and contractor-owned, contractoroperated organizations. You have to look at the whole perspective. From a life-cycle management perspective, we are looking at the ammunition industrial base holistically From the GOGO to our commercial vendors, we are ensuring that we are prepared for the future and are supporting the war effort. Everyone knows, sooner or later, we are going to slow down and we must be prepared for that, too. We must slow down in the right way so that we do not hurt our commercial and government base capabilities. So, when you weigh all those challenges, its a very complicated task to execute. We at PEO Ammo, JMC and ARDEC have taken that mission on to ensure that we modernize the right areas in the organic industrial base and continue to support the commercial industrial base as well. Its our responsibility to ensure that everyone understands our whole purpose in life is to make the best quality ammunition for the warfighter - bar none!
What I have seen change is that we are trying to refine and better articulate this overarching ammunition industrial base with requirements and capability and scoping that down to determine if we have the right mix of government and civilian structure. Are we going in the right direction to ensure that we can support the warfighter in the future? Not only is the infrastructure critical, but we must also start to think what the next munitions are going to be. You have to prepare yourself- in the government and commercial world - for that next step and that's where the ARDEC folks come in.
AL&T: Soldiers can't fight without ammunition. Are we doing a better job today than we were 4 years ago in supplying the right ammunition to the right place at the right time? What initiatives have JMC or the SMCA put in place to resolve that?
Rogers: I think we have done a better job across the board of ensuring that the stockage is there to support not only this contingency, but other potential contingencies. We have created better analytical tools to project what will be needed in a specific theater before it's even requested. The necessary infrastructure is in place to ensure that the ammo arrives when and where it is needed and that the quality is there. As far as support operations for Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom are concerned, I don't think any Soldier has ever gone without a type of ammo that he or she has ever needed. That, to me, is what this mission is all about - quality ammunition that is there when Soldiers need it.
AL&T: Under the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program, the JMC lost a significant amount of covered storage space without a corresponding decrease in stored stockpile. How will JMC manage this?
Rogers: We are losing some covered storage space, but that was factored in when BRAC was developed. Originally, one of our biggest storage facilities out at Hawthorne, NV, was on the BRAC list, but it was pulled off and that alleviated some of the problem. The Integrated Logistics Strategy has also helped us redefine how we store stocks safely in all our igloos. It has garnered us space throughout our depots to be able to store munitions more efficiently and be more ready to outload should the requirement arise. We are continuing to improve and refine the process. We have an initiative with ARDEC right now to work some 3-D models into our storage capacity, so when individuals say, "I need to store something, it is coming in next week," they can look inside the igloo and see what is there and see whether it will fit by testing it. It has constraints - you could not store incompatible ammo because the algorithm in the system would not let you. That will be a pretty powerful capability, and we are working that for the future.
Right now, our biggest concern for storage is our demil program. We have a large percentage of ammo that must be destroyed because it has become obsolete or is excess to the warfighter's requirements. It's still safe to store, but it needs to be demilitarized. That bill is increasing and the Army is the executive agent for demil of conventional ammunition. We have all the other services' demil as well, which is also growing. We have an ongoing effort now to try to stabilize the money so that we can reduce the demil requirement in the out years. We have a very robust demil program, but it has never been funded to our full capacity. It is so critical that we continue to free up igloo space for the next generation of rounds, so demil is something we're aggressively pursuing. We are optimizing the space and repositioning the stocks to best support our war fighters. We are also working hard to obtain the funding we need for demil so we can destroy excess and obsolete stock.
The JM&L LCMC recommended the law change relative to reinvestment of revenue from recovery and recycling demil operations, and AMC supported the initiative. As we continue to execute environmental stewardship in all our demil processes, it becomes more expensive to operate. The issue becomes how to garner money to do that. As you melt out a bomb, for example, we have found there are other uses for fill, such as selling the fill to mining companies for commercial slurries as long as the stability factor is still there so it is safe for them to use. Then, you have a big chunk of metal. The idea was, if we could resell the metal as scrap after making it safe, you could take that money and place it back into demil funding. Instead of demilitarizing say 20,000 rounds this year, we could afford to demil 25,000 rounds. This not only incentivizes the installations to participate, but it reduces the demil burden and helps off-set rising costs. It's a great initiative.
AL&T: If you could "fix" one thing with the way we procure or produce ammunition, what would it be?
Rogers: Our biggest challenge is establishing stable requirements. This affects the entire government and commercial industrial base. If you look at a graph of ammo requirements and how they have varied over the years, you would see a sinusoidal curve that peaks during a conflict and drops off dramatically immediately following the conflict. We are aggressively trying to fix that. The challenge is competing demands for federal dollars.
We are trying to better articulate requirements for all the services so we can predict what we call the "soft landing" for the industrial base. Predicting this presents a huge challenge. Requirement estimates can change substantially from year-to-year based on numerous factors and the changing world situation. I do not know if we will ever reach the point where we can avoid a periodic drop in requirements, but we are working this hard as a total munitions community through the LCMC, the services, commercial and government suppliers, and the depots. HQDA G-3, G-4 and G-8 are critical players in this issue as well.
AL&T: Safety is a big issue, both in storage and handling the ammunition. What safety initiatives have been put in place to ensure better safety for both Soldiers and civilians working in our arsenals?
Rogers: For us, safety is the most import ant thing. As you can imagine, handling, making and storing ammunition is extremely hazardous, so you must understand the hazards and eliminate or mitigate the risk in everything you do. We have, through AMC, initiated in all the depots, OSHA's [Occupational Safety and Health Administration's] Voluntary Protection Program. Our depots and arsenals are shooting for 'Star Status,' which means that OSHA recognizes you as having all the controls and processes in an aggressive safety program. This is considered the top of industry and is very difficult to achieve. It brings every person into the safety program. The biggest safety challenge is having every worker on the line thinking safety every second of every day. Because if they don't and they take shortcuts, things can go 'boom' that you don't want to. The next step is that the supervisor must think that way as well. Although we say the commanders are ultimately responsible - I am the safety officer for the JMC just as GEN Benjamin S. Griffin is the safety officer for AMC when it hits the road, you have to go down all the way to individual workers, and they must be their own safety officers because they want to go home safe each night. That is what we have built into our safety processes. That is the GOGO side where we have government civilians working.
In the GOCO sites, we have dedicated a safety officer to each one of our plants that contractors operate. We require them to have a very aggressive safety program. The safety officer's sole mission in life is to ensure that the plant complies with the established safety standards. That has been very powerful, over the years, to ensure that safety is the number one concern and is emphasized every day.
AL&T: What is the most important message you would like to convey to Soldiers who might read this issue of Army AL&T Magazine?
Rogers: They should never worry about the quality of ammo they receive. What's powerful about the LCMC is that I have Logistics Assistance Representatives [LARs], ammunition LARS and QASAS [Quality Assurance Specialist Ammunition Surveillance] personnel all the way down into the units. They are emergency essential and deploy with their units. The LARs and QASAS ensure that ammo is stored safely, that it's ready and safe when Soldiers pick it up, and that it's safe when it has been stored for an extended period of time, especially in the harsh conditions Soldiers live in. We will never concede on our quality standards and we will always do everything humanly possible to give Soldiers the bullet that they need before they need it. That is what is key to us. I never want a Soldier worrying, "Am I going to get the next bullet that I need?"
[Sidebar]
The JMC provides critical acquisition and logistics support to the PMs through the resident expertise on our commodity teams.
[Sidebar]
The JOCG is responsible for guiding and influencing conventional ammunition life cycle for all services. JOCG participants are involved in the development and updating of joint SMCA policy and procedures, and they address urgent and important issues relative to insensitive munitions and the services' safety concerns.
[Sidebar]
Now we have a system all the way down to the individual bullet, the DODIC level, to show where all our ammo is around the world, what condition it is in and whether or not we are ready to support training and operational requirements.
[Sidebar]
It's our responsibility to ensure that everyone understands our whole purpose in life is to make the best quality ammunition for the warfighter - bar none!
[Sidebar]
We will never concede on our quality standards and we will always do everything humanly possible to give Soldiers the bullet that they need before they need it.
[Author Affiliation]
MEG WILLIAMS is a Senior Editor with BRTRC s Technology Marketing Group. At the time of this interview, she was providing contract support to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan and an M.S. in marketing communications from Johns Hopkins University.
