LESSONS FOR THE LONG HAUL


94 series Soldiers who are co-located or nearly co-located with the system will be to reduce operational readiness down- times to days—or even hours—after repair parts are received. Current down- times for CSS VSATs can stretch from one to four months while the system waits for the contractor field service rep- resentative assigned to that region to be available to perform the repair—on top of the five- to six-week wait to receive the necessary parts.


GEARING UP Soldiers and civilians participating in Network Integration Evaluation 15.2 prepare a CSS VSAT to support the May 2015 exercise. Because it does not have the data rights for CSS VSAT, the government cannot reverse-engineer comparable parts, and the Army is limited to purchasing replacement parts through the original equipment manufacturer. (Photo by MAJ Jonathan W. Judy, Project Manager Defense Communications and Army Transmission Systems (PM DCATS))


programs do. Now, transitioning to organic sustainment, PL DWTS faces the challenge of maintaining and updat- ing the 3,620 fully fielded


systems


that are projected to remain in service indefinitely—well beyond the initial expectation that War fighter Information Network – Tactical (WIN-T) terminals would replace CSS VSATs by 2009.


GETTING TO SUSTAINMENT


“Today we depend on a limited number of contractor’s field engineers for CSS VSAT maintenance and repair,”


said


LTC Jeff Etienne, the PL DWTS. “Tran- sitioning from contractor support to organic [support] enables us to provide more comprehensive support than would be practical or affordable otherwise. It also provides numerous benefits to Sol- diers in terms of decreasing operational readiness downtime, and supports the DWTS strategic mission to provide the best-value solutions for enabling informa- tion dominance Armywide.”


To provide the same level of support to fielded CSS VSATs as organic sup- port makes available, PL DWTS would have to more than double the number of contractor’s field engineers. “Our [94 series] Soldiers are already trained to do stuff like this,” said CW4 Michael Nel- son, capability developer for integrated logistics supportability at the Combined Arms Support Command (CASCOM).


“We do it with other systems already. So budgetwise, it should be an improvement because Soldiers are doing what they’re actually supposed to be doing.” Another advantage of


adding 28 support from


Organic sustainment replaces the con- tractor’s six regional field engineers with 13 field service representatives from the U.S. Army Communications – Electron- ics Command (CECOM). Teir efforts will be supplemented by the introduction of on-site support from 786 active-duty Soldiers from the 94 series military occu- pational


specialty (MOS)—electronic and missile maintenance.


As part of the transition from contractor- led sustainment to organic sustainment, PL DWTS completed the logistics dem- onstration of CSS VSAT in July 2015. Tis timing was unusual for a product that began fielding nearly a decade ago and has since supported critical opera- tions worldwide in combat zones and special humanitarian missions such as for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Pakistan earthquake relief


in 2013 and Opera-


tion United Assistance: Ebola in 2014. Te standard Army acquisition life cycle requires programs to conduct a logistics demonstration, a rigorous evaluation of the program’s maintenance concept and supportability strategy, before the initial operational test to evaluate the readiness of the system support package; fielding occurs sometime after that.


With successful completion of the logis- tics demonstration, CSS VSAT moves one step closer to providing enhanced sustainment support for the long term, well beyond its original life span. It also confronts two lessons learned that should apply to all rapid fielding initiatives dur- ing their early planning stages.


BUY DATA RIGHTS UPFRONT First, it is critical to include procure- ment of the technical data rights in the original competition. Given the originally planned short life cycle for CSS VSAT,


Army AL&T Magazine April-June 2016


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