FOCUS ON THE INDUSTRIAL BASE


SUPPORTING TANK PRODUCTION Foreign Military Sales (FMS) of the M1 Abrams tank have helped maintain production facilities and sustain U.S. tank manufacturing capability. Here, M1A1 Abrams tanks sit parked at a secured compound at the Besmaya Combat Training Center southeast of Baghdad, Iraq, Aug. 29, 2011. The Government of Iraq purchased of 140 M1A1 Abrams tanks through an FMS agreement with the United States. (Photo by SSG Edward Daileg, 305th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment.)


OVERARCHING EFFORT The Under Secretary of Defense for Acqui- sition, Technology, and Logistics has made it a priority “to establish a process for systematically including industrial base issues in our budget deliberations,” said Dr. Eugene Gholz, Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy.


The S2T2 effort, which will create a data repository using various collection tech- niques including surveys, site visits, expert interchanges, and dialogue, is a step in that direction. It is designed to establish early warning indicators of risk in the commer- cial sector, promote policies to mitigate potential points of failure, reduce over- reliance on foreign sourcing, and identify areas of limited competition, Pybus and Gholz said.


“The idea is to avoid soda-straw studies that look at one particular thing for one particular purpose. The idea is to come to an enterprise level of understanding of all the connections in the industrial base,” Gholz said.


“We want to be able to bridge particular niche capabilities that we are going to need that, right now, we are not buying,” he said. “Different sectors of the industrial base are quite different in terms of their technological maturity, so you have to understand the industrial base sector by sector and then tier by tier.”


Gholz described the S2T2 process as a series of ongoing assessments of manufac- turing capacity and technical know-how to inform budget decisions and enable investments that will preserve strategically


important technological priorities for the future. He said the surveys look at prime contractors, subcontractors, and second- ary suppliers with a mind to their often complex, interwoven relationships and interactions. Sustaining the capacity to produce technologies and, in some cases, manufacture prototypes is a key part of this equation, he noted.


“Production capacity involves machines and factories and also involves worker skills, connections between production, designs, and an innovative capability to make the next generation of capability,”  surveys was sent out last year, Gholz said.


“We have thousands of responses from facilities, primes, sub-tier suppliers, and all sectors of the industrial base. We are


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Army AL&T Magazine


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