READINESS: MORE THAN A CONCEPT


FIGURE 1 IPS Elements Life Cycle Sustainment Management


• Product support management. • Supply support.


• Packaging, handling, storage and transportation.


• Maintenance planning and management.


Technical Management


• Design interface. • Sustaining engineering. • Technical data. • Computer resources.


Infrastructure Management


• Facilities and infrastructure. • Manpower and personnel. • Support equipment. • Training and training support.


U.S. Army, comprising National Guard and Reserve units in about 15 Western states.


Acquisition’s piece of the readiness pic- ture is primarily equipment, Dillard said: “Do I have the vehicles, weapons and other things on hand versus autho- rized, and are they in a state of ability to be used? Acquisition certainly affects the training piece, training devices and other things, but largely it’s the equip- ment piece, more so than the personnel piece. It’s the design of our systems, which is really important for reliability and availability and maintainability so that the equipment portion of the readi- ness rating is as high as it can be and stays that way.”


THE REQUIREMENTS FACTOR Designing systems involves the require- ments community, too, of course. But the acquisition community can influence the shape and scope of requirements to a sig- nificant extent, said Dillard and Jones. In the case of an armored vehicle, for exam- ple, “the number of hours, the number of track paths, the number of gallons of gasoline burned—those kinds of things can be variable,” Dillard said.


BETTER INPUT MEANS BETTER OUTCOME


The acquisition process often slows down when there’s not enough collaboration between the materiel developer and the combat developer to understand the impacts of specific features on a system or item that Soldiers are asking for. These integrated product support (IPS) elements provide a good framework to consider various important factors. (SOURCE: Defense Acquisition University)


“Te need is what it is. Te materiel devel- oper doesn’t get a vote when it comes to the need,” Jones said. “Where we do get a vote is how the need is developed. We’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning of the process” to best support readiness.


editors discussed readiness with Dillard and Jones in a July 11 phone interview.


Dillard referred to “Army Regulation [AR] 220-1, Army Unit Status Reporting and Force Registration – Consolidated Policies,” which establishes the Defense


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Readiness Reporting System – Army, among other things, to break readiness down into three major components: per- sonnel, equipment and training. In the course of his 26-year Army career, he grew familiar with AR 220-1 as head of the readiness reporting branch of the 6th


Program managers (PMs) tend to focus on awarding the right contracts and com- plying with acquisition regulations, Jones noted. “We don’t spend a lot of time say- ing to ourselves, ‘If you had just changed that design, or if we had done it this way, we wouldn’t have had to add one more hour of training on the back end,’ and


Army AL&T Magazine


October-December 2017


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