SYNCHRONIZING THE FORCE


KEEPING UP THE FLEET Sustainment of the Army’s helicoper fleet is one of the key questions that the G-8 faces as it looks at the next steps after bringing materiel home from Afghanistan. Here, AH-64 Apache helicopter maintenance Soldiers with 1st Attack/Reconnaissance Battalion, 501st Aviation Regiment (1/501 ARB), Task Force Dragon, conduct a 500-hour phase-maintenance inspection June 27 at FOB Fenty, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. (U.S. Army photo by SGT Armando Avila, 1/501 ARB Public Affairs)


We turn next to ABO and look at how we are executing against it [the budget]. How is AMC doing? FORSCOM? TRADOC? What do we need to shift? Tis is what the reset task force is trying to bring together. We then go to talk to ASA(ALT) and say, “How are you spending the money? What’s not been spent?” We do this each year. We try to synchronize requirements and resources with acquisition. It’s relatively granular.


We also use the outcomes of this work to tee up conversations with the Hill. We frequently need to have dialogues with the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. A couple of years ago, we had too much money because there was a lot of equipment we thought we had to bring back to the States but instead


were able to divert from Iraq to Afghani- stan. We thought we’d have a heavier track requirement than we did, so there was a lot of work programmed for track maintenance, which wasn’t needed. Te result was that we had about $1 billion left over. So, we went over to the Hill and talked to professional staff members and made sure they knew what we were doing and why. Our task force work helped to shape that conversation.


Army AL&T: Can you tell us what the most important lessons learned are from retrograde in Iraq?


Skibicki: I think the number one lesson we learned was to bring everybody, all the lines of effort, to the table. We did that prior to the drawdown from Iraq


with rehearsal-of-concept drills run by U.S. Army Central/Tird Army (ARCENT) and AMC. ARCENT made sure that all the necessary participants were there, from the actual units that had the equipment and their higher-level commands, to the transporters, to the LCMCs that reset the equipment, the people developing require- ments for diverting equipment from Iraq to Afghanistan, and ASA(ALT)—every- body was there. We made sure all of the subject-matter experts and members of the team were involved. Te last session we had of the R4D General Officer Steering Committee, we made sure everybody was there—Army National Guard, U.S. Army Reserve, FORSCOM—all the affected commands, because everybody has a dif- ferent perspective. U.S. Army Pacific Command has a different perspective on


68


Army AL&T Magazine


October–December 2013


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