$2b database to keep tabs on Army stocks.

Seeking to manage a rapidly growing inventory of war equipment, the Army is spending nearly $2 billion on a new database that will track 3.4 billion items.

The Army decided to build this so-called "corporate database" because it did not have the means to capture its massive inventories of equipment in a cohesive manner.

As billions of dollars worth of new hardware poured into the Army during the past four years, it became more difficult for the senior leadership to grasp the rapidly expanding inventory.

"Equipping success had unintended consequences," says Lt. Gen. Anne E. Dunwoody, Army deputy chief of staff for logistics.

"The corporate database lets us see what we have in the Army," she says in a presentation to an industry conference. With the new system, the Army's senior staff will be able to pinpoint the location of 3.4 billion items and determine whether they should be moved elsewhere based on war needs, Dunwoody says.

To pay for the database costs, the Army received $306 million in fiscal year 2007, and is seeking $1.6 billion in the war-emergency budget request for 2008.

The corporate database, she says, is "critical" to the Army's ability to equip units in a timely manner so they can meet their deployment schedules. It also will help the Army more easily figure out what items should be eliminated from the inventory. The Army, for example, has 27,000 old, unusable vehicles that "we'd like to clean out," says Dunwoody.

In recent months, the Army has come under intense criticism for equipment shortages throughout units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Defense Department inspector general issued a scathing report last month that was based on interviews with 1,100 soldiers in 2006. The report cited shortages of armored vehicles, electronic countermeasure devices, crew-sewed weapons and communications equipment.

"Service members stated that, when possible, they used informal procedures to obtain the force-protection equipment they needed to perform missions off base in Iraq and Afghanistan, including borrowing equipment from and trading equipment with other service members," the IG report says.

Army officials contend that claims of equipment shortages are exaggerated.

"There is a lot of confusion on whether we are taking care of soldiers," says Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, Army deputy chief of staff for resources. He says the Army is spending on average $17,000 per soldier to provide all the necessary equipment. "There will be no degradation of standards," he says at the industry conference.

Army officials at the Pentagon declined to comment specifically on the IG report because of the political sensitivity of the subject. Part of the problem, one officer says, is that many soldiers in the field are told by family and friends back home that they can get better gear from the Cabela's outfitter catalog than from the Army.

While some commercial suppliers of tactical gear provide high-quality items, the Army cannot guarantee their safety and prefers that soldiers only use Army-issued equipment, says spokesman Lt. Col. Carl Ey.

In recent years, dozens of veterans groups and many families of deployed soldiers have organized massive campaigns to ship care packages with items such as Nomex fire-retardant garments and body armor, claiming that the Army is failing to provide protective gear.

Speaking to reporters from Iraq, Col. Bryan Owens, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 82nd Airborne Division, says he is "very happy with the way we've been equipped." The Army, he adds, "has bent over backwards to supply us with the latest technologies and also the latest protective gear."

Lt. Col. Chris Craft, who oversees material requirements at Army headquarters, says that careful analysis goes into the decisions of what to buy.

"We can't buy everyone everything possible that they believe they need. We have to do risk analysis," Craft says in an interview.

The Army's improved database helps expedite the process of delivering urgent requests, he says. While it used to take six months to a year to process a request, it now takes the Army 14 days to move the request through after it's cleared by U.S. Central Command, says Craft. As part of the vetting cycle, Army officials have to consider things such as whether the request is a reasonable one, whether the items sought are available in the supplier base, or whether the Army already may have those items in the inventory.