Army aviation beset by spare-parts shortages.

The Army is facing, in the coming months, the daunting task of repairing ground vehicles and aircraft returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Maj. Gen. Joseph Bergantz, the program executive officer for Army aviation. The service will be asking for a supplemental appropriation to deal with the repair and cleaning of Army aircraft, which on a large scale have sustained a lot of damage, Bergantz said at an aerospace industry conference in Dayton, Ohio. He said that it would take the Army between 18 to 24 months to get the job done.

Meanwhile, the Army needs a plan to overcome critical spare parts shortages, said the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Despite a significant cash infusion from Congress in the past couple of years, the shortage of spare parts remains a problem, GAO said.

The Army projects it will spend $7 billion in the 2003-2005 period on spare parts. The Army said it needs an additional $415 million to sustain the force in fiscal year 2003 and $263 million for 2004, to support operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, said the GAO report, published in June.

The Logistics Management Institute concluded that an additional $331 million for spare parts would increase the overall readiness of the Apache and Black Hawk helicopters by approximately 2.6 percent.

Congress would like more information on how spare parts budgets affect equipment readiness, said the report. According to GAO, the Army has spent $4.9 billion from its annual operations and maintenance account, as well as $225 million in supplemental funding since fiscal year 2001 for spare parts. Despite the growth in spending, the Army continues to experience shortages in spare parts that jeopardized readiness for both aviation and ground weapon systems, said the GAO report.

None of the Army's current initiatives specifically address critical spare parts shortages, said GAO. The Army's Transformation Campaign Plan, published in April 2001, seeks to create a more strategically deployable and responsive force. However, the GAO report said, it lacks objectives and performance measures it could use to show progress in mitigating critical spare part shortages

The Army recently started a "readiness enhancement initiative" in 2002 to partly address the lack of spare parts, but this effort is limited in scope, and, therefore, said the GAO, its effects cannot be measured accurately. Entitled the "Top 25 Readiness Drivers," the initiative identifies the top 25 components that are key to the readiness of the service's 18 major combat systems. Of the total 450 spare parts the Army had identified as critical to equipment readiness in February, 291 or 65 percent of the parts were stocked below the required level.

"The initiative's effectiveness may be limited, because its efforts and results are not linked to or coordinated with the goals and metrics of the Army's other initiatives as part of an overall approach to mitigating critical spare parts shortages in the future," the report said.

Even though the Defense Department concurred with the general intent of the recommendations, it disagreed on specific actions required to solve the problem. The department asserts both the TCP and the service's other disparate logistics initiatives are correctly focused and require no modifications.

Additionally, the Army is forming partnerships with manufacturers to provide spare parts and technical assistance to the Corpus Christi Army Depot in Texas, where depot-level repair is performed on the Apache and Chinook helicopters.

"The Army improves repair operations and saves money by obtaining hard-to-get, sole-source parts and technical assistance for a negotiated cost, and the industry partner is able to keep production lines open by relying on steady demands from the Army," said an Army official quoted in the GAO report According to the Army official, this type of partnership has improved depot repair operations. For example, the average mean time between failures in the Apache and Black Hawk engines has improved from 400 hours to 1,140 hours. The repair cycle time for components has been reduced from 360 to 95 days, the Army official told the GAO.