As commander, 568th Transportation (Aircraft Maintenance & Supply) company, my mission was to provided Alaska-wide aviation maintenance direct support to the 222nd Aviation Battalion (Combat) and general aviation support to the Alaska Army National Guard, i.e., we had a direct and general support aviation maintenance and supply mission.

Unit prescribed load lists (PLL)—a 15-day supply of demand supported items--and command authorized stock levels (ASL)—a 15-day unit backup and an additional 30-day supply of repair parts and components under a direct exchange program—to insure the operational readiness of theater aircraft, i.e., Alaskan Command were supposed to be in place; however, when I arrived, the 568th Transportation Company wasn’t able to support its own immediate unit maintenance mission, much leas augment the 222nd Aviation Battalion or the Alaska Army National Guard and their aviation unit maintenance responsibilities with direct and general support aviation maintenance and supply capability.

Because aircraft were geographically scattered across a state nearly the one third the size of the United States and unit maintenance personnel performed maintenance operations outside their training and authority routinely. Units did what they wanted to do and, if a problem arose, finger pointing began which was almost always resolved by a team from the lower 48 or a commercial fixed-base operator. The aircraft maintenance and supply system was broken!

Fort Wainwright was shrinking and buildings were available. I asked the garrison commander if I could have a large warehouse on the main road which had an adjacent rail spur. He wanted me to justify the space which I did using my theater authorized stock levels responsibilities. We located parts in vacated buildings where items had been stored for years, is some cases for aircraft that were no longer in the inventory; however, we discovered that we had all of the theater reserves for aircraft that were being used throughout the Army and were permitted to get credit and shipping money to meet shortages world-wide.

After splitting the ASL from the PLL supported units felt more comfortable ordering and returning supplies, I felt better because the two missions were, although compatible, incompatible with prudent supply operations because the unit mission came before the theater mission in many cases and that went undetected until readiness reporting time when it became apparent that the maintenance unit was laying favorites.

In reality, we were in the business of service but indifference in command structure had produced much inefficiency, i.e., the 222nd Aviation Battalion commander had argued that all aviation should be under his control—read, I need all the people and parts to survive. Because United States Army, Alaska (USARL) was headquartered in Anchorage, and the 568th Transportation Company co-located in Fairbanks with the 222nd Aviation Battalion, staff decided to place a theater operational unit under an aviation battalion commander who, in essence got all the parts and the theater mission and Alaska Army National Guard got screwed. At the time he had, at best, an “ash and trash” mission to support the 172nd Arctic Light Infantry Brigade—Lieutenant Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf was the deputy commander.

Commander, 222nd Aviation Battalion was not interested in the theater mission and tried to command all of the aviation repair parts and supplies for his aircraft which led to serious latency and poor visibility into processes and outcomes. As aircraft maintenance systems become more complex, the problems grew, especially when it became apparent that he had neglected his theater responsibility to provide avionics maintenance and supplies to the US Air Force an Eielson and Elmendorf Air Force Bases.

The USARL staff was a huge gathering of outdoors types who waited to depart for fishing or hunting trips every Friday and holiday and return early in the next work week to plan another outdoor trip. Mission, unless the unit was slated for a training area, was the last thing on folk’s minds in 1972.

After sorting-out the aviation electronics and aviation maintenance and supply operations we made a horrible discovery, i.e., they are slow and prone to errors—mainly because the supply system required absolute manual intervention and their was no oversight until monthly reports were digested in St. Louis at the National Maintenance Point and the National Supply Point! Then, to complicate matters, problems were channeled into an aviation program office in the bowls of the Pentagon run by a retired Transportation Corps Lieutenant Colonel with railroad experience and an attitude.

In 1973 USARL was dissolved and we came under US Forces Command (FORSCOM). In an early interview about supply problems and in response to an Inspector General complaint about supplies, I complained that in any process that includes manual steps, you introduce errors and la­tency and poor visibility which makes it difficult to prevent bot­tlenecks and system failures.

The FORSCOM guy was unimpressed; but, emerging trends such as a Decentralized Automated Service Support System (DAS3) fuel expectations that real-time information at division level is a realistic goal—problem was we were living in an NCR 500 world that was embroiled in project and special interests.

Fortunately, not all processes need to yield real-time information—FORSCOM soon discovered that if they tracked supply requests, and denied those made by unauthorized requestors, i.e., the units who were doing work without authorization; we were headed in the right direction.

About that time commander, 222nd Aviation Battalion left and his replacement, a friend of Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who was now the commander--in June of 1974, the 172nd Infantry Brigade was reorganized to include three Light Infantry Battalions. Lieutenant Colonel Bradley Johnson was eager to make changes and permitted the 568th Transportation Company, at my request, to fulfill its larger direct and general support mission—I was then serving as S3 (operations officer, 222nd Aviation Battalion).

As S3, I frequently crossed paths with Major Fritz Gunther, one of the social group, over batch or near-real-time pro­cessing, i.e., supply and maintenance. In actuality, appointing me as S3 was the biggest break I was ever given and a real opportunity to couple maintenance and readiness which were two different reporting systems.

It became apparent to me that organizations that optimize supply processing by reducing manual handoffs and centraliz­ing batch processing gain immediate readiness value and add flexi­bility to their modified tables of distribution and equipment.

Following my Alaska assignment, I attended and graduated with and from the US Army Command and General Staff College Bicentennial Class—1976. Assigned to the US Army Military Personnel Center (MILPERCEN) as a distribution desk officer—I managed officer assignments, i.e., human skills against authorization documents.

Automation was making inroads and using command requisitions and reports it was easy to evaluate who should go and when they should arrive based on training requirements or qualifications. It was my first exposure to a massive collection of voices whom all said yes or no—they retired or went as directed to fill a unit requirement. When I first looked at the system it was a mismatch of skills and requirements where the rule was an officer could be assigned against a requirement one grade above or two grades below an authorized space, except for specific allocations which were managed off line.

Lieutenants never entered the system until they were ready for deployment which made a lot of folks anxious because it always appeared as if they would be short. We operated on an even and odd cycle for stateside and Continental United States requisitions and the time periods dropped off after reaching 11 months because of the lead-time to train and qualify a replacement. That became a serious problem in Germany where we has a Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) in force and our ceiling could not exceed 103 percent of the authorized unit strength.

MILPERCEN—Europe used a manual assignment system—not unlike the early supply requisitioning system I’d grown up with in aircraft maintenance units starting in 1956 and before that at W.W. Granger Company as a stock picker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Dear “Chief” General Blanchard began his letter…. Lieutenant General DeWitt C. Smith Jr., Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel, called me into his office and asked, “Is there a problem?” From what I knew there wasn’t; however, after a year on the job I had reservations but no proof. Colonel Jack Tumlinson was chief of the distribution division and he told me to find out. Fortunately, I had worked diligently with Captain Bill McDaniels, our automation technician, who mapped-out a plan to find out.

Armed with a personnel database, I went to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, and got a financial database—we figured that a soldier was physically stationed where he was paid and qualified for station allowances. During the flight to Frankfurt, I worked out a series of sorts needed and broke that down into geographic location, command by grade and name structure. Armed with a Standard Form 41—purchase order—I went to IBM Frankfurt where they combined the tapes and we identified officers, by name, rank and service number and specific geographic identifier.

Then I went to several unites in Heidelberg and Frankfurt to spot check it for accuracy—100 percent--and armed with that data I reported to commander United States Army, Europe--Four-star General Frederick J. Kroesen. He was engaging and introduced me to a First Personnel Command liaison officer, Major Larry Bonine, and we went to their headquarters in Schwetzigen, Germany.

It didn’t take long to discover what the problem was, fixing it was a different story because USAEUR, and the other commands and their agencies, had many independ­ent functions and thousands of entry points.

The First PERSCOM action officer, MAJ Larry Bonine, got it right away! PERSCOM contracted IBM Frankfurt to integrate the tapes I had made and from that time on there was never another question about the Standard Installation/Division Personnel System (SIDPERS) accuracy or content and after learning a huge lesion it was apparent that the readiness reporting system was broken.

Not long after my return, I was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and reassigned to the Aviation Office, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Logistics, as an aircraft general systems specialist—action officer. It was in this assignment that I was able to resolve the discrepancy between aircraft maintenance and readiness reporting which began as a bizarre task to standardize aircraft definitions used among the armed forces identified by the Comptroller General’s Office. Nobody, I mean nobody in that office, wanted anything to do with coordinating anything with the other services, much less work under the specific supervision of a Department of Defense action officer.

The task appeared like a natural! Agree on a standard set of description, agree and implement them into maintenance and readiness regulations. The Navy and Air Force language had several differences; however, none that didn’t relate directly to the Army definitions and I set-up the task. Mr. Joseph P. Cribbins, our Senior Executive Service office chief, was among those who were indifferent to the change and he told me to complete the task.

Having been from aviation maintenance my entire professional life, and serving in every possible aircraft maintenance and supply assignment to that point, including duty at the US Army Aviation Systems Command where I served as the Chief, Configuration Management Division, Directorate for Research Development and Engineering, where I had written and coordinated Army Regulation 70-37, “Configuration Management, I was no stranger to the system.

With a lot of help from the publications office and the typing pool, I was able to get a coherent document sent to the required command headquarters for coordination. Concurrently, there was a requirement to publish an Aviation Intensive Management Items (AIMI) Program regulation that was causing significant problems for the US Army Aviation Systems Command (AVSCOM). Now that was a project Mr. Cribbins was interested in accomplishing because the commanding general, for that matter any general, was his single focus!

Since draft AR 750-1, Army Materiel Maintenance Policy and Retail Maintenance Operations was being staffed, Field Manuals, Technical Manuals, Technical Bulletins, Department of the Army Pamphlets, Army Regulations, Training Circulars, Technical Manuals, Joint Publications and Department of the Army Forms, etc all needed to be reviewed, revised and staffed. But the one document never reviewed was AR 220-1, Unit Status Reporting, i.e., the single document that let the Army leadership know if they were ready to perform missions and at shat level they could begin.

On of the crisis following Vietnam was the perceived loss of a professional ethic. Every military school I attended following my return starting with the Transportation Officer Advance Course had a major component on ethics. Following our withdrawal from Vietnam, ethics was the focus of many symposia and command interest. Essentially, the leadership was distorting reports and records to secure advancement or more favorable promotion possibilities. Some would say I’m mistaken; however, having prepared the maintenance and supply and installed and spare engines report in nearly every unit I was assigned starting in 1958, and then being responsible for preparation of a combat aviation battalion unit readiness report, I knew that the two systems did not report the same thing!

Aircraft could be grounded for major assemblies or repair, or for that matter have been damaged and required depot overhaul, but still counted available for readiness reporting if a float or augmentation could perform the unit mission. In my mind that was the essence of an ethical problem and I had been given the job of correcting the discrepancy.

Creating and staffing the AIMI Circular was child’s play because AVSCOM needed it published to avoid a major finding on a General Accounting Office report. It went to the front of the list and, since it affected only one command, was published in record time. During its staffing, the joint, special, unified and major commands had followed the path taken by Mr. Cribbins and assigned a single action officer to coordinate all of the responses.

What an extremely fortunate irony! I knew every action officer and knew a lot about their backgrounds. The one I knew at a distance was Lieutenant Colonel Art Van Damn who was leading the US Army Material Command’s review of AR 220-1. He and I were aviators but he had never worked in aircraft maintenance or supply. He was more operation oriented and had significant experience in that area.

We met for a coordination meeting when he laid-out his task to align the reporting systems and wanted to know if that could become part of the regulation I was staffing? I prepared a message, which Mr. Cribbins released, asking for comment. Not surprisingly, the major command commanders were aware of the reporting discrepancies and instructed their staff’s to combine their responses.

It was amazing. Replies came in and a draft regulation was published and again sent to everyone, including the National Guard Bureau and Army Reserve. Colonel John Stanko headed the National Guard maintenance and supply operation and he was elated because the dual reports passed through his headquarters and they were never able to merge the replies.

In 1979, I was selected for command of the 205th Transportation Battalion (General Support) and started on a series of mandated pre-command schools, i.e., legal, language, maintenance and supply reporting and aircraft qualification. During that time I was physically on temporary duty and my regulation was being managed by the typing pool, i.e., they got the comments to me and I returned them for coordination with the Departments and various commands by mail.

When I finished my command courses, I returned to the Pentagon for my final three months before transfer. AR 220-1, AR 710-1, etc., and all of the related publications agreed, and were distributed. Art called me and said he was placing Mr. Cribbins original in a “Top Secret” folder because the field was going to have a fit over the merger and he was certain that the increased visibility would be wholesome but career terminating for many. I honestly did not understand the weight of his statement until General Shoemaker Forces Command commander called and requested that I brief him at Fort McPherson, Georgia on the new readiness regulation—a request that Mr. Cribbins could not refuse even though his contacts had called and expressed their displeasure at the commingling of aircraft maintenance and supply and readiness reporting. Frankly, it made my job easier and ultimately led to a better understanding of terms and definitions and finally standardized our reporting.

General Robert M. Shoemaker had been Chief, Plans and Programs for Army Aviation, then-Colonel Shoemaker and I had briefed him several times. I also met him again in 1969 when he became Assistant Division Commander of the "First Team." My first unit was to the "First Team” as a Sikorsky H-19 crew chief in the 15th Aviation Company, Sin San Ni, South Korea; however, I was soon deployed to  A-1 on the Demilitarized Zone outside the city of Munsan-ni, South Korea, in 1958.

As an aside, our platoon redeployed to Taipei, Taiwan and was assigned to the United States Military Advisory Group but conducted flight operations off the USS OAK HILL, the third Harpers Ferry class Dock Landing Ship, that repositioned along the coast of Taiwan as we observed pipeline and Nike controller and launcher facility construction.

General Robert M. Shoemaker had a call from his III Corps Commander at Fort Hood, Texas, and others, that had been rather alarming! “They’ve combined reporting systems and our unit readiness report isn’t going to look good.” He simply asked me to guide him through the requirement. He asked no questions and when I completed my comments, he asked me to wait for him in the conference room. Not long afterward an aide said to return to the Pentagon.

I departed for my command tour and, like all good things, arrived in the 568th Transportation Battalion just in time to write my first unit readiness report. It was an eye opener. Good thing the unit condition was not of my doing and better since it would be easy to make sense of what we could and could not accomplish.

One of the biggest problems was our supply parts availability! We still used the NCR 500 for requisition a manual maintenance and supply Information Management System to catalog and then print requisitions. The team chief then took a printed list of parts to our supply company where they completed a DA Form 9-79, Parts Requisition in writing which was then reentered on punch cards and placed in tubs for batch processing at the 3rd Support Command Material Management Center near Frankfurt. I was nub! The error rate was high and our satisfaction rates low because part numbers and National Stock Numbers were being changed continually. What didn’t get rejected was entered incorrectly and if it got through we didn’t have the right priority code and spent an inordinate amount of time “scrounging.” None of the V Corps units were happy and readiness was low.

It was low enough to trigger a special inspector general inspection which began at the unit level and was then going to encompass the support and theater support units. Germany was, for many, an extended trip to ski destinations and fast driving. For me it was Déjà Vu the 568th Transportation Company (AM&S) all over again. We had a local purchase fund for the year of about DM 10,000.00—about US 8,000.00 dollars. It was enough to purchase a “bridge” that we could use once we converted to DAS3 so I let the contract amid lots of criticism about “blowing the whole bundle” on a stupid assembler. Well, when it was all said and done, our error rate was negligible and we started getting parts which led to increased aircraft availability and we were able to purify our stock levels.

Captain Jerry Henderson was the Company A commander and without his effort, and the complete cooperation of everyone, we could not have accomplished the transition from a manual system to an automated on—the 394th Transportation Battalion, our VII Corps partner, was on its ass and Mr. Cribbins was sent by the Deputy Chief of Staff, Logistics to discover why I was improving and thwy were not.

After several meetings, Mr. Cribbins wrote me a short note simply saying, “You owe it to me to make Larry successful.” Lieutenant Colonel Larry Holcomb and I had never met but he was an alumnus of the Aviation Office. I flew to Nellingen, Germany, and without any fan fare realized that the supply system in both Corps and the theater was a mess. We could not transfer parts without USAREUR approval and there was no way to get there because of the way funding is approved.

We simply bypassed the system and used German United Parcel Service to send parts we had to improve their readiness. What I could not do was convince anyone that my “bridge” should be integrated into every unit supply and maintenance system because the old technical service ways of doing things were too well established.

The system IBM build instantly respond to workload surges without buckling, especially during unpredictable events, such as field training and maneuver exercises throughout the Corps area.

The manual supply system was good, but unable to react quickly enough to such surges, and introduced errors, particularly in high-pressure situations. My belief was that only an automated IT infrastructure could adjust processing priorities and clarify what our needs were for efficient readiness.

The problem was simply that batch process schedules tradi­tionally used date- and time-based trig­gers to launch jobs. In a seamless environment, those triggers are in­adequate for critical business processes and the “bridge” gave us the ability to adjust to dynamic events and higher integration possibilities.

I also knew from my courses at the Department of Defense Computer Institute that while functionality can theo­retically be scripted into a process, hard-coded solutions support only static operations and offered minimal visibility into the execution of those processes.

When I became Commander, US Army Service Center for the Armed Forces my central view was that application process­ing is important for efficient IT operations in government and corporate environ­ments. Because the majority of business processes touch many applications and platforms, the "fire and forget" method creates islands of automation that func­tion without integration or coordination. That produces errors and potential system downtime, process latency and expensive integration scripting.

I knew that achieving an agile IT infrastructure is no easy task. Automating business pro­cesses and integrating disparate platforms from a central location is a step in the right direction which is what I did with the Army Library, the State Department Passport Program, our Fleet Management System and the Department of Defense Airline Reservation System operations. We made them responsive and continued to tweak efficiencies out of them.

Probably my biggest discovery was a Telzon scanning device and barcodes! The Army wanted a complete inventory of all equipment in the Pentagon. Mr. Larry Glover was the supply director and we talked about options when the directive was issued. At some point, I was in the Giant 24-hour store on my way home—I lived in Falls Church Virginia at the time. I observed a clerk scanning, counting and entering,

When I asked him what he was doing, he told me, “inventory.” I asked where his pad and sheaf of fanfold paper was. He held-up a scanner. “Don’t need it!” I have a list of items to scan which is prepared by the IT guys, I go to the location, identity the item, or identify one that is out or low, scan it and enter the number than transmit.

The scanner is coupled to a wedge and the information uploaded into the system. I wrote the manufacturer information down and called the next morning. Luck had it. One of thief representatives was in Washington, D.C. marketing the tool. When she was done, Mr. Jeff Hill, a Vice President, and she brought their case over. Since I had already seen it in operation, I asked her what it would take to set our system up.

We used their system to inventory every item of Army property. Modified it to manage our passport system and installed a barcode system in the Pentagon Athletic Club to determine facility requirements and staffing. We expanded its use to our retail sales store and adopted swipe and key operations in every location where they would provide a human benefit. The net result was exceptionally high customer support and no more nagging questions about status.

As a direct result of our Telzon experience, we were able to assign five employees to the State Department Passport Operations Office where they managed the Department of Defense passport system. Booze Allen Hamilton, a strategic management and technology consulting firm which offered a full range of consulting activities, won a contract to integrate out passport reporting system with Department of Defense Agencies around the globe.

This was a rather delicious trick that permitted me to promote many employees who had been clerical to supervisory while permitting passport clerks to enter data around the world and our employees reviewed it for accuracy and completeness while waiting for the official paper passport application. Once the information was available, and there was an original signed application, the data was processed off line to our State Department staff who transferred the data to the State Department system.

What an improvement. The day I assumed command we had more than 4 million untracked passport and visa applications. When we implemented the program, the backlog was cleared away in a few months and we started to manage the process. It had gotten so far out of whack that a Field Operating Agency was making noises that they could do the job more efficiently—had we not encountered Telzon, they may have gotten the job because it was a nightmare!

The real test came at the outset of Desert Storm and Desert Shield. If there was any doubt before, that military action and the swift requirement to process passport applications proved that we live in an unpredictable world, but unpredictable business appli­cation processing doesn't need to be part of it.

The passport and visa system was scalable, flexible infrastructure tools were off the shelf that enabled us to monitor and manage system wide pro­cesses offer significant gains in IT reliabil­ity and service levels, while providing the agility needed to manage increasing busi­ness complexity and respond to random events.

Less latency and downtime in govern­ment IT means better service for those de­pending on the systems; a lesson I brought to the Pentagon from Fort Eustis, Virginia where I served as Commandant, US Army Aviation Logistics School.