The brigade maintenance program at home station sets the climate for maintenance management during the fast-paced decisive action fight. Brigade Combat Team can overcome the challenges they will face at the National Training Center by implementing best maintenance practices. The maintenance system will never be effective or efficient in a tactical scenario if it is not practiced at home station.
Leader Responsibility
The brigade maintenance system is critical to the accomplishment of every brigade combat team’s and battalion/squadron’s mission. The system must operate every day, year-round to support unit training and contingency operations. Leaders must be intimately familiar with their equipment, the equipment faults, the process to get the equipment repaired, and the supply chain containing the repair parts.
Commanders at every echelon must set the tone necessary to achieve the 10/20 standard. Subordinate leaders must take ownership of their equipment and hold their team to the standard if they are going to have a positive maintenance culture in their unit. At the National Training Center, the Goldminers have three specific best practices to produce positive maintenance results: how the maintenance meeting is run to include Equipment Status Report (ESR) management, considering the option to operate a consolidated maintenance collection point, and maintenance talent management and training.
Maintenance as a Combat Multiplier
An effective brigade maintenance meeting is a combat multiplier. However, many units try to apply their garrison focused maintenance meeting agenda to the severely time-constrained environment at the National Training Center. The enemies to an effective maintenance meeting are an unclear agenda, leaders that are not prepared or not familiar with their equipment and its faults, and an untested PACE plan. The agenda drives situational understanding and helps focus subordinate leaders on the commander’s priorities.
Many units will default to simply reviewing the ESR by unit, but this is a highly inefficient practice if any commander is involved in the meeting, despite what the maintenance Warrant Officers may argue. A detailed scrub of the ESR can easily take two hours and will still not provide any projections of what combat power will be available in the next 12-72 hours. When battalion Executive Officers and maintenance Warrant Officers arrive at the meeting with their updated analysis of their ESR, proper identification of parts requirements, diagnosis of faults, and their class IX repair part requirements, then the maintenance meeting will produce positive results.
In-person maintenance meetings encourage cross-unit coordination, cross-leveling of resources, and are simply more productive than distributed maintenance meetings. Unfortunately, conducting meetings in person is not always feasible. A maintenance meeting PACE plan is necessary, or it will be overcome by events and the Operational Readiness Rate (ORR) will rapidly fall as units attempt to solve their equipment challenges without prioritization or access to necessary resources.
Set Priorities
The best brigade Executive Officers set the priorities for maintenance by unit and by equipment type based on their understanding of the scheme of maneuver and the requirements of the commander. Once the priorities are set, each battalion or task force should provide their SITREP before going into a deep dive on the ESR. ATP 4-33 recommends the following maintenance meeting agenda:
- BDE Mission next 24/48/72 hrs.
- BDE Priority of maintenance
- XO issues
- SPO issues
- Review of issues from previous meeting
- Current combat power
- Status of CL IX parts
- Cross-level options
- Projected combat power based on maintenance management
- Miscellaneous
- Review of issue assignment
- Closing comments
Briefing the battalion SITREP early in the meeting will provide a snapshot for the overall status of combat power so that the BCT commander can sit in to a small portion of the maintenance meeting and leave with a good understanding of the combat power that he will have available for the next phase.
Maintenance Control Points
The frequent movement of Maintenance Collection Points (MCPs) causes instability and less time to accomplish diagnostics and repairs leading to a decrease in combat power. If the commander sees that his combat power is falling below an acceptable level, he may decide to consolidate MCPs at the Brigade Support Area (BSA). Consolidating maintenance activities at the BSA provides several benefits that speed up the generation of combat power, but this comes at a cost.
A commander may make the decision to move their MCP to the BSA if their ORR falls below an acceptable level. Moving maintenance activities to the BSA drastically shortens the supply chain, thus improving access to repair parts. Many units live on their Shop Stock Listing (SSL), but the SSL can only hold a fraction of the parts depth found in the Common Authorized Stockage List (CASL) located at the BSA. The shortened supply chain eliminates the double handling of parts and increases the velocity of repair parts to maintainers.
The consolidated MCP also provides the stability for the mechanics to make the repairs that may require additional time. Battalion MCPs will often move frequently to maintain proximity to the Combat Trains Command Post (CTCP), but this challenges a mechanic’s ability to properly diagnose and repair the faults. The Brigade Field Maintenance Company in the BSB also contains all the commodity shops and the expertise necessary to make on-system repairs instead of removing components that will lengthen overall repair times.
Consolidated Maintenance
Consolidating maintenance at the BSA does have some drawbacks, however. Consolidating MCPs at the BSA can drastically increase the physical size of the BSA and its life support requirements. The BSA is typically a large area already, and the inclusion of additional non-organic elements can increase the size to unmanageable proportions. The protection of a support area that is the size of a grid square with a dozen BSB organic crew served weapons is difficult, and that difficulty compounds when the perimeter becomes larger.
The most successful units welcome the consolidated MCP into the perimeter with a copy of the BSB TACSOP and their specific task and purpose while on the BSA. The crews for the damaged systems can provide a significant aid to BSA protection. Their weapon systems, when integrated into the BSA defense plan, dramatically increase the lethality of the BSA.
Culture of Maintenance
The culture of maintenance in the BCT and each leader’s authorities can set the stage to avoid having to consider the consolidation of MCPs. The Field Maintenance Companies contain some of the most overworked and underappreciated Soldiers in the BCT, but they are not the only solution to the maintenance challenge. Operator level maintenance is critical to ensuring a maintenance program is producing a fleet ready to conduct its wartime mission. Each Soldier must have a technical manual available so that a correct and thorough Preventive Maintenance Checks and Service (PMCS) can be conducted and annotated on the 5988-E. A PMCS with the technical manual in hand and not from memory will catch minor faults before they become large dead lining faults.
Operator ownership and pride leads to more involvement in repairs and a greater respect for work involved in repairs. Understanding of the repair work causes operators to pay more attention to their equipment’s indicators, further reducing the requirement for unscheduled maintenance. Some units have gone so far as to assess financial liability to individuals when equipment fails due to negligent operations or from operating equipment beyond its capabilities. Training operators to know the limits of their equipment, how to conduct a proper PMCS, and encouraging pride and ownership in their equipment will reduce the workload on the Field Maintenance Company dramatically, but it will not eliminate it.
Talent and Training
Maintenance talent is managed primarily by the leaders in the BSB. The BSB commander serves as the proponent for placing Logistics Officers in the FSCs and BSB base companies, but the assignment of Logistics Captains should be approved by the BCT commander. Enlisted maintainer talent is managed by the BSB CSM with input from the maintenance technicians across the BDE as they often have the most contact with the younger Soldiers and will know how to best develop their talent. Ensuring the right maintainers are allocated requires a great deal of attention and care to ensure that the FSCs are all manned so that they can best support their assigned battalion. Ensuring that this management lies within the BSB allows the BSB commander to exercise their authority to surge and weight the main effort, in accordance with ATP 4-33. The maintainers in our formations will not receive all the necessary training during their AIT to be truly effective. An untrained maintainer will damage additional components while attempting to make a repair, thus extending the time equipment is Non-Mission Capable (NMC).
Individual training recommendations can all be found in DA Pam 600-25. Additionally, the Army Credentialing Opportunities On-Line (COOL) (www.cool.army.mil) provides information about civilian certifications and licenses related to MOS and ASIs, eligibility and exam requirements, and preparation resources. The Global Combat Support System – Army (GCSS-A) is the tool used to manage a wide range of functions including materiel management and maintenance. All maintenance managers will benefit from completing the following courses in the GCSS-A Training and Certification (GTRAC) on-line training: GCSS-A Overview, Basic Navigation, Intermediate Navigation, Data Mining, Process Flow, Using the EUM+, Maintenance Supervisor, and Store and Forward Maintenance.
While the Automotive Service Excellence professional certification is not an Army course, the experience and general knowledge acquired through the certification process will dramatically increase mechanic proficiency. Lastly, take advantage of the COMET teams and TACOM representatives at home station as training facilitators to avoid needing them to correct larger issues.
–
Training to maintain equipment is a task that enables the BCT to accomplish its wartime mission. A ruthless inspection of equipment and processes in the motor pool will feel painful and unnecessary to the Soldiers that are on the receiving end of the inspection at the time, but it can also foster individuals’ pride in their equipment. Soldiers will have more confidence that their equipment will help them close the distance with and destroy the enemy.
The BCT maintenance meeting builds situational awareness of the fleet and resources parts to increase readiness. Consider the triggers to consolidate MCPs at the BSA to shorten the supply chain, but do not ignore the impacts of burdening the BSB commander with additional unit tenants. Develop the maintenance talent in the equipment operators and the mechanics. Treat maintenance as a system that runs 24 hours a day and commanders will be able to validate their readiness rates during routine training and combat operations.
POCs: Goldminer 02, Maj. Dan Cole , daniel.w.cole1.mil@mail.mil; Goldminer 26, Capt. Tuan Dang, tuan.m.dang4.mil@mail.mil; Goldminer 26A, Master Sgt. Charles Taylor, charles.p.taylor.mil@mail.mil
–
You can access the entire Maintaining at Pace NTC Update in a PDF HERE – or click the link below for an archive of all Lessons from Atropia.
Complete archive of The Company Leader Posts