2008 fall edition

2008 DEFENSE STANDARD 3

DS08_vol3:Layout 1 8/20/08 10:52 AM

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CONTENTS

20

11 Letter from the Publisher

The U.S. and the Philippines

How the two old allies are reuniting to fight Al Qaeda in the Philippine jungles

By Tom Breen

The Face of Courage on the Battlefield

Saluting women in uniform and how they got to where they are today

By Sara Michael

Battlefield MedicineA look at some of the innovations that are saving lives in the war zone

By David Perera

Tanker Troubles

The competition for the Air Force’s new aerial refueler drags on into 2009

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12

20

36

42 America’s Logistics LeadersThe Defense Logistics Agency finds new purpose in wartime

By James Kitfield

PLUS: An interview with the outgoing DLA director, Lt. Gen. Robert Dail

PROCUREMENT and OPERATIONS

PLUS: The first two female recipients of the Silver Star since World War II

By Nick Adde

PLUS: Special operations expert John D. Gresham on Operation Enduring Freedom - Philippines

12

28

36

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CONTENTS

ON THE COVERU.S. Army Spc. Jennie Baez provides security for fellow soldiers during an operation in the Al Anbar province of Iraq in this September 2006 photo.

PHOTO: Lance Cpl. Clifton D. Sams

52

62

The Pentagon’s Secret WeaponHow robust advances in C4ISR give U.S. forces the edge in battle

By Rich Tuttle

Joint Tactical Radio SystemHow JTRS brings new communications capabilities to the front

By Rich Tuttle

Air Force: Unmanned Aerial SystemsBy Lee Ewing

Army: Modular Force

By Tom Breen

Marine Corps: CommunicationsBy Bryant Jordan

Navy: Attack Submarines

By Michael Fabey

’09 PROCUREMENT SPOTLIGHT

ON THE HOMEFRONT

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74 Helping Citizen Warriors

Supportive employers go above and beyond for deployed Reserve and Guard members

By Tom Philpott

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FACETheof

Courageon the Battlefield

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2008 FALL EDITION

DEFENSE STANDARD HQ4410 Massachusetts AvenueSuite 240Washington, D.C. 20016Phone: (202) 640-2137

DEFENSE STANDARD OPERATIONS CENTER14502 N Dale Mabry Hwy, Ste 200Tampa, FL 33618Phone: (813) 864-6360

David PeabodyPublisher

Kelly MontgomeryPresident

Daniel J. PeabodyVice President Operations

Drew MorrisHomeland Security Advisor

Steve SherwoodField Operations

Melissa MarkettaBrenda MyersDesiree Diggins

Administrative Support

Kelsey DeanAccounting Manager

Julie BirdManaging Editor

Samantha GibbonsCreative Director

Al GomberVice President Sales

Richard HultsVice President of Military and Government

Mark A. WilsonNational Accounts Manager

Brooks MorganProject Manager

Josh Good Melvin Suttle

Account Representatives

Senior Writers:

Tom BreenJohn D. GreshamJames KitfieldRich Tuttle

Writers:

Nick AddeLee EwingMichael FabeyBryant Jordan Sara MichaelDavid PereraTom Philpott

Copyright 2008. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited. The opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views of the publisher. Defense Standard LLC assumes no responsibilites for the advertisements or any representations made in this publication. Defense Standard LLC in unable to accept, or hereby expressly disclaims, any liability for the consequences of inaccuracies or omissions of such information occurring during the publishing of such information for publication.

Disclaimer: Neither the Department of Defense nor any other United States Government agency has approved, endorsed or authorized this publication in any form. No such inference is suggested, promoted or communicated in any manner.

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Publisher’s Note


Welcome to the Fall 2008 issue of DEFENSE STANDARD Quar-terly. With this issue, we continue

our tradition of bringing you deeply reported, richly written stories about the men and women of the U.S. military and the industry and innova-tion that supports them.

Our cover story salutes the contributions of America’s military women and looks at how their roles have changed to reflect the 360-degree bat-tlefield. Writer Sara Michael examines the suc-cesses and the sacrifices women have made over the years in this compelling report. Additionally, Nick Adde tells the stories of former Army Guard Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester and Army Spc. Monica Lin Brown, the only two women since World War II to have received the Silver Star, the na-tion’s third-highest combat decoration.

Also in this issue, senior writer Tom Breen tells the little-known story of how U.S. Special Operations troops are teaming with the Armed Forces of the Philippines to root out Muslim ter-rorists with ties to Al Qaeda. Breen also reports about what the growing U.S. military presence in the Philippines means some 17 years after the Mount Pinatubo eruption closed the two major U.S. bases on the island nation. Noted author and military historian John D. Gresham, an acknowl-edged expert on Special Forces, adds some his-torical perspective with a look at the origins of Operation Enduring Freedom – Philippines.

You’ll also find an in-depth report by senior writer James Kitfield into the new operational mindset of the Defense Logistics Agency and how it has transformed and energized the agen-cy’s support of wartime operations. Don’t miss Kitfield’s exit interview with Army Lt. Gen. Rob-ert Dail, who talks about what it took to remake the DLA into a more modern, combat-oriented organization.

Critical advances in C4ISR and related pro-curement plans are examined by senior writer

Rich Tuttle, who also takes a look at the Joint Tactical Radio System. Advances of a different sort are explored by David Perera, who talks with military physicians and industry leaders about technological advances that are saving lives ev-ery day on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. We also take a look at the long, contentious battle for the Air Force’s KC-X aerial tanker contract.

Innovative employers are the focus of Tom Philpott’s first report for DEFENSE STAN-DARD. Philpott, the respected voice behind the weekly Military Update news column, reports on how employers nationwide are supporting National Guard and reserve members and their families during long deployments. Some are go-ing so far as to continuing paying the citizen war-riors’ salaries while they are deployed.

We also explore major procurement priorities for 2009: the Air Force’s accelerated purchases of Unmanned Aerial Systems; the Army’s new Modular Force requirements; the Marine Corps’ focus on communications systems; and the Na-vy’s ongoing attack submarine buy.

While we don’t know what the new year and a new administration in Washington will bring, we do know this: America’s military will continue to be the world’s premier fighting force and, with the support of the country’s defense industry, the world’s foremost innovators on the battlefield. This, too, we know: DEFENSE STANDARD will be there to tell their stories.

David PeabodyPublisher

CourageofThe Face

By Sara Michael

on the Battlefield

An Army nurse bandages the wrist of a wounded soldier in Korea in February 1951.

Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Patricia Mescus repairs an A-4 jet at Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, Japan, in 1976.

Somewhere in England in 1945, Maj. Charity E. Adams of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) inspects the first contingent of African-American WACs assigned to

overseas service.

PHOTO: Courtesy of National ArchivesPHOTO: Courtesy of Women’s Memorial Foundation PHOTO: Courtesy of National Archives

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Pat Jernigan, now a retired Army colonel, is wearing the first pantsuit allowed by the Army in this 1977 award cer-emony, where she is photographed with John Hughes, then a senior Defense Intelligence Agency official.

Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Amanda Kokx hands out humanitarian aid to a local woman at a hospital at Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield in 2006.

Members of the U.S. Public Health Service Cadet Nurse Corps at Sioux Valley Hospital, Sioux Falls, S.D., in 1943.

In the 17 months she spent in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Maggie Nelson waded in canals up to her chest, searched Iraqi women for weapons during night

raids, and shared a table with top Sunni Arab leaders in Kirkuk.

She’s been shot at; her vehicle hit a roadside bomb. She has sat around in an armored truck telling jokes with fellow soldiers in combat.

Only rarely was Nelson, 45, a public affairs officer in the Oregon Army National Guard, reminded she’s a woman – usually when she noticed someone staring at

her in the streets of Iraq.Like many of the women Nelson met in Iraq and Af-

ghanistan, she was a warrior first, serving her country in roles blazed by the women who have served before her and with her, those recognized with top honors and the thousands who have filled the ranks with little fan-fare over the years.

“We’re just doing it,” said Nelson, who was headed back to Oregon recently after about 30 months of be-ing deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’ve accept-ed the terms and the rules and we are ourselves.”


PHOTO: Courtesy of Pat Jernigan PHOTO: Spc. Michael Zuk

(1-800-645-4827)

Senior Airman Melissa Gallardore places retaining rings on a wheel from the main landing gear of an F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft at Balad Air Base, Iraq, in March 2008. Gallardore is a crew chief with the 332nd Expeditionary Maintenance Squadron deployed from the Montana Air National Guard.

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In Iraq and Afghanistan, women helm units at nearly every level, assisting in raids and searching for contraband. They are working as combat medics, defusing roadside bombs, flying helicopters and constructing roads and bridges. In fact, about one in 10 of the U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are women.

“They are doing a great job and really proving they are willing to do what they need to for the country,” said 1st Lt. Amanda Straub, a public affairs officer in the New Mexico Army National Guard. Straub spent time last year with two fe-male combat medics in Afghanistan deployed with a National Guard combat team. Oregon Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Jo Turner and Spc. Cheryl Ivanov drove armored Humvees and provided medical support to the unit. “Those ladies lived it all, did it all, saw it all,” she said.

Although Defense Department policy still technically bars women from being assigned to units whose main mission is to engage in direct combat, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become 360-degree battlefields.

“Ground combat has come to them,” said retired Navy Capt. Lory Manning, director of the Women in the Military project at the Women’s Research and Education Institute.

The total number of women on active duty has swelled to nearly 196,000, accounting for more than 15 percent of offi-cers and 14 percent of enlisted members.

As of August 2008, 112 women had died in the two wars, 600 had received Purple Heart awards for wounds sustained from enemy action, and two women had received the Silver Star for heroism, according to the Women’s Research and Ed-ucation Institute.

Women have continued to slowly open doors in the mili-tary, adding to the list of jobs they are performing and honors they are receiving.

“Whatever we were allowed to do, we did it doggone well,” said Pat Jernigan, a retired colonel and board member of the U.S. Army Women’s Foundation. “We’ve been steadily prov-ing we can do it.”

On the Front LinesDecades ago, female four-star generals were unheard of

and combat decorations for women were rare.When Jernigan joined the military in 1964, training for

women looked more like “finishing school” than boot camp. They learned military traditions, history, how to march and how to best wear the skirt and pumps of their Class A uni-forms. “The emphasis was to look like ladies and act like la-dies,” she recalled.

In 1948, when women became eligible to serve in regular active peacetime forces, their numbers and promotion oppor-tunities were capped. Women couldn’t command men, and any woman who became pregnant was immediately discharged, according to the Women’s Research and Education Institute.

The progression of emerging roles has been driven by soci-etal change, women’s proven ability to perform the tasks, and by the military’s need for service members. The end of the

draft in 1973 began the all-volunteer force era, and an erosion of more barriers as the services reached to fill the ranks. The Navy began to accept women for aviation duty in noncombat aircraft, and the Coast Guard started taking women for regular active duty, according to the Women’s Research and Educa-tion Institute.

Advancements come in a time of crisis, said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, president of the Women in Military Service for American Foundation, a nonprofit that operates the Women’s Memorial. When Vaught joined the mil-itary in the 1950s, the highest rank she could hope to achieve was lieutenant colonel. Until 1967, women were restricted to administrative duties, but she later became the first woman in the comptroller field to be promoted to brigadier general. “It was more than just what women would like to do,” Vaught



said. “It’s what the nation has been required to ask them to do.”

In Iraq, for example, this has meant having women partici-pate in the raids, because Muslim culture forbids women from being touched by a man other than her husband. “Females are very, very much a part of this fight,” said Nelson, who participated in the raids.

The decades-long de-bate of the roles in which women should serve con-tinues even as women are serving and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. Women are still barred from po-sitions on submarines and specialties such as infantry, armor and field artillery, but by all ac-counts they are routinely facing enemy fire.

The women who have died in Iraq were often on the front lines, serving as military police, truck drivers, medics and engineers when their vehicles struck im-provised explosive devices or their units were attacked by in-surgents. Among them:

—Lt. Ashley Huff, 23, who grew up in Louisiana and New Jersey, was leading a military police unit in Mosul, Iraq, in September 2006 when she was killed by bomb exploding near her vehicle.

—Maryland native Toccara Green was escorting and driv-ing in convoys when the 23-year-old was killed by a roadside bomb at a refueling stop in Al Asad, Iraq, according to news reports.

—In January 2006, 25-year-old Jaime Campbell, a first lieuten-ant with the Alaska Army National Guard, was killed Jan. 7, 2006, when her Black Hawk helicopter crashed near Tal Afar, Iraq.

“There is no safe area,” said Brig. Gen. Mary Kay Hertog, director of security forces for the Air Force, where she is responsible for planning and security for more than 30,000 ac-tive-duty and reserve security forces worldwide. “I have women patrolling the streets of Baghdad just like their male counterparts.”

Path to ChangeIt was in Operation Desert Storm 18 years ago that women

really began to assume close-combat duties, serving in roles

that shattered barriers. “That’s when they realized you can’t draw a line and say, ‘This is the line’ if you are in a combat support unit,” Vaught said.

More than 40,000 women were deployed for the Persian Gulf War. Fifteen women were killed, and two taken prison-

ers of war. The idea of a female prisoner of war had been a paralyzing horror and a rallying cry for many advocat-ing limited battle roles for women.

That fear became a reality when then-Maj. Rhonda Cornum, an Army flight surgeon, was captured while re-sponding to a helicopter crash in the 1991 war. She suffered serious injuries when her heli-copter was shot down, and spent eight days in captivity in Iraq. “Be-

fore her people thought, well what if a women is

taken prisoner and sexually attacked, and that’s what hap-pened,” said Vaught.

Cornum went on to serve a successful military career af-ter the war faded from the headlines, Vaught noted. Now a brigadier general, Cornum is the Army’s assistant surgeon general for force projection.

Women’s service in the Persian Gulf prompted Congress to repeal the law banning women from flying in combat, but it wasn’t until two years later that the Defense Department

policy changed to allow women to take those assignments. Then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin also directed the Army and Marine Corps to study opening more as-signments to women, according to the Women’s Research and Educa-tion Institute.

The wars in Iraq and Afghani-stan brought women even closer to direct combat, becoming a test of women’s abilities under fire. “It’s remarkable the things these young women are doing today in Iraq and

Afghanistan,” said retired Army Lt. Col. Marilla Cushman, a spokeswoman for the Women In Military Service For Amer-ica Memorial. “They all say, ‘I could do that because of my training.’”

Two women serving in those wars have received the Silver Star, the third–highest military honor – the first time women

“There was a time when you did so much and you weren’t recognized. It makes me feel so proud to be part of a change.”

- Army Master Sgt. Shelina Pitt

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Airman 1st Class Kara Dykes, part of the 332nd Expeditionary Security Forces’ immediate reaction force, mans an M-107 sniper rifle at the entry control point for Balad Air Base, Iraq.

60 Years of Women in the Military1948

Women are eligible to serve in the regular active peacetime forces, as long as they don’t constitute more than 2 percent of the total force, and of that women officers can total no more than 10 percent.

’67The 2 percent ceiling is lifted, and women are eli-gible for promotions above captain/lieutenant.

’74

Army women become eligible for aviation duty in noncombat aircraft.

’75Women can enroll in the Coast Guard Academy.

’76

Congress opens the remaining service academies to women.

’89 770 women deploy to Panama for Operation Just Cause. A female MP commands troops in combat-like operations, and women flying Black Hawk helicopters come under fire. The Navy assigns its first woman as Command Master Chief at Sea.

’90-’91

More than 40,000 U.S. women are deployed for the Persian Gulf War. Two Army women are taken prisoner by Iraqis, and 15 U.S. military women are killed.

’91

The Navy assigns the first women to command a naval station and an aviation squad-ron. Congress repeals laws banning women from flying aircraft engaged in combat missions.

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have received the medal for valor in a combat mission since World War II.

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester, who was assigned to the Kentucky Army National Guard’s 617th Military Police Company, was recognized for her actions in leading a counterattack against insurgents near Baghdad in March 2005. Nineteen-year-old Army Spec. Monica Brown, a medic, received the Silver Star in 2007 for saving the lives of five wounded soldiers whose Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghani-

stan.In July, then–Lt. Gen. Ann Dunwoody became the U.S.

military’s first female four-star general and assumed com-mand of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. “It’s a testament to her ability,” Jernigan said, “And the women that have gone before her that have done darn good.”

Standing TallLaura Browder, an author and associate professor of Eng-

lish at Virginia Commonwealth University, expected to hear familiar stories of what motivated and inspired women in the military when she spent time with nearly four dozen female veterans for a series of narratives and photographs on display at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.

Instead she was struck by the range of experiences. Some women joined the military for college benefits while others were West Point graduates. Some were single mothers, others in dual military marriages. Most of the women, however, were passionate about their service, enthusiastic about being deployed and serving in combat zones. One woman called being with her unit in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, Iraq, the high point of her life.

“It was very empowering for many of them,” Browder said. “They were doing jobs Congress de-cided they shouldn’t but they were doing them, and they were prepared to do it.” Although many said they have had to work harder to prove themselves, they also identified as soldiers first, women second,

DEFENSE STANDARD 2008

Spc. Rebecca Buck provides security on the perimeter outside an Iraqi police station in the Tarmiya Province in March 2008. Buck is an Army medic from Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division.

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DEFENSE STANDARD Graphic: Samantha Gibbons

60 Years of Women in the Military

2008’93

Congress repeals the law banning women from duty on combat ships. Women deploy on the USS Fox. The Army names a female Drill Sergeant of the Year for the first time in the 24-year history of the competition.

’94The USS Eisenhower is the first carrier to have per-manent women crew members. Sixty-three women are initially assigned. More than 1,000 women serve in operations in Somalia between 1992 and 1994.

’96

The first women are promoted to three-star rank.

’97The Army promotes its first woman to lieutenant general.

’98

An Army lieutenant general becomes the first woman nomi-nated and confirmed for four-star rank.

U.S. women aviators fly combat aircraft on combat mis-sions for the first time in Operation Desert Fox.

’00The Air Force promotes a female pilot to brigadier general. Two female sailors are killed and several wounded in the terrorist attack on the USS Cole.

A female enlisted Marine is killed in an aircraft crash in Pakistan, the first woman to die in Opera-tion Enduring Freedom.

The first woman since World War II is awarded the Silver Star for combat action. She becomes one of 14 women in U.S. his-tory to receive the medal. The first woman joins the prestigious Air Force Thunderbirds aerial demonstration team. She was also the first woman on any U.S. military high-perfor-mance jet team.

’02 ’05

Sources: Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation Inc. and the Women’s Research and Education Institute’s sixth edition of Women in the Military: Where they Stand.

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Browder said.Army Staff Sgt. Gail Miller struggled to be

considered on the same level as her male coun-terparts 20 years ago in her early days as one of about 100 women in the 15,000-member 82nd Airborne Division.

She kept her head down, she said, staying fo-cused on her job and making sure not to look as if she were asking for any special favors. “As long as you work hard and do your job, your male counterparts will respect you,” said Miller, a 39-year-old single mother of three based at Fort Bragg, N.C.

Now she meets teenage girls in her son’s Ju-nior ROTC program pushing themselves just as hard as the boys, completing the same physical tests. “These are the next group of soldiers en-tering the military,” she said. “It’s a wonderful feeling.”

For Army Master Sgt. Shelina Pitt, 39, the re-cent accomplishments by her fellow female sol-diers make her “walk around and stand tall.”

“There was a time when you did so much and you weren’t recognized,” said Pitt, also stationed at Fort Bragg. “It makes me feel so proud to be part of a change.”

Straub, the National Guard lieutenant in New Mexico, joined the military out of high school as a way to figure out what she wanted to do with her life and earn money for college. She now is focused on rising through the ranks,

a dream she said was made possible by the women who served before her.

“Every one of those jobs paved the way and proved wom-en are capable of it and opened up even more jobs,” she said.

“I’m definitely a career person,” she added. “I’d like to get a star or two.” J

Petty Officer 3rd Class Cindy R. Skinner, an operations specialist, uses a telescopic alidade to report on surface contacts aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Es-sex in the Pacific Ocean in November. The Essex is the lead ship of the only forward-deployed U.S. Expeditionary Strike Group.

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By Nick Adde

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester

The quote is now etched in glass as part of the permanent display at the Women for Military Service to America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, Va.

Leigh Ann Hester won’t do interviews – not with the main-stream media, not with publications that serve her colleagues in uniform. In fact, she has left the service and won’t even talk to the Kentucky National Guard public affairs people.

But requests for her time continue to stream into the Guard’s PAO shop. Journalists want to tell the story of what transpired during that firefight in Iraq on March 20, 2005, after her convoy was ambushed by a contingent of about 40 insurgents. They want to hear, in her own words, how Sergeant Hester became the first woman to receive the Silver Star Medal – the Army’s third-high-est honor for valor in combat – since World War II.

By her silence, Hester has made it clear that she wants no part of any activity that would single her out above the male comrades in her unit, Richmond, Ky.-based 617th Military Police Com-pany, Army National Guard, who fought alongside her and also earned honors for their actions.

Whether Army Spc. Monica Brown of Lake Jackson, Tex-as, is deliberately following Hester’s example by staying mum about her own accomplishments is unclear. But indeed, Brown too shuns the media spotlight despite numerous requests. And like Hester, Brown too has earned the Silver Star for valor in combat.

Still, the harrowing stories of their actions beg to be told.

Convoy Under AttackAccording to an account published by the Army at the time

Hester and her comrades received their awards, the unit was pro-viding security for a convoy of 26 supply vehicles as it moved along a busy highway southeast of Baghdad, near the town of Salman Pak. The soldiers traveled in three Humvees with armor reinforcement. Besides the weapons each of the soldiers carried with their gear, the vehicles were armed with .50-caliber machine guns and Mark-19 grenade launchers. The third Humvee carried a combat medic.

The soldiers noticed that dust was being kicked up among the trucks in front of them – a good sign that trouble was afoot, pos-sibly an ambush or attack by an improvised explosive device (IED).

“We knew something was wrong,” Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein,

a squad leader who also earned a Silver Star that day (later up-graded to a Distinguished Service Cross), told the Army News Service.

The soldiers soon noticed that the convoy vehicles were moving in evasive zigzag patterns, and heard the sound of gunfire. They quickly moved in, found themselves positioned between the insurgents and the convoy, and immediately became the focus of redirected enemy fire.

The insurgents had stationed seven vehicles nearby, which they planned to use for a quick escape. But the three Humvees happened to move into a position between the at-tackers and their rides home, forcing them to stand and fight.

A rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) struck the lead Humvee, injuring its machine gunner, Spc. Casey M. Cooper. Nein jumped out and be-gan returning fire from a flank.

“Nein’s vehicle took a direct hit with an RPG as soon as we made that turn,” Hester told Army News Ser-vice in an interview. “I heard it hit, saw the smoke, but we kept pushing. I saw Staff Sgt. Nein jump out of the truck. As soon as I saw him jump out, I was right there.” Seeing the Humvee take the RPG hit, Hester joined Nein in the full-blown small-arms firefight that ensued.

“I think I shot off three M203 (grenade launcher) rounds, and I don’t know how many M4 rounds I shot,” Hester said in the interview. “I know I hit one of the … gunners.”

Together, Hester and Nein fired upon their insurgent attackers for some 45 minutes before the battle ended. The soldiers had killed 27 insurgents, wounded another six, and captured yet an-other. They also confiscated 22 AK-47 assault rifles, an array of rocket-propelled arms, and an AK-47 ammunition drum, as well as scores of banded and loose AK-47 rounds and hand grenades.

Three soldiers were wounded; none died.Standing shoulder-to-shoulder in formation with her com-

rades from the 617th MP Company, Hester received her Silver


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Honoring two female Silver Star recipients

This Award doesn’t have anything to do with being a female. It’s about the duties I performed that day as a solider.

- Army National Guard Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester“

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“It became a huge commotion, but all I could let myself think about were my patients.”

- Spc. Monica Lin Brown

Spc. Monica Lin Brown


Star during a ceremony at Camp Liberty, Iraq, on June 16, 2005. In addition to Hester and Nein, Spc. Jason Mike also was awarded a Silver Star.

Cooper, Spc. William Haynes II and Spc. Ashley Pullen re-ceived Bronze Star medals with valor devices; Sgt. Dustin Mor-rison and Spc. Jesse Ordunez earned Army Commendation medals with valor devices.

Military honors for Hester did not end there. In February 2007, the Army Women’s Museum at Fort Lee, Va., featured Hester’s role in the Salman Pak ambush prominently in a new exhibit com-memorating women’s roles in the war on terrorism.

Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma Vaught, the president of the board of directors of the Women for Military Service to America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, says Hester only agreed to attend the Fort Lee ceremony when officials acceded to her request that every soldier involved in the operation that day was invited as well, and that the display pay honor to their heroism on an equal footing with her own.

“She felt she was just one of the soldiers and deserves no more recognition than anyone else who was there that day,” Vaught says.

They agreed. At the display’s unveiling, Vaught says, each member of the team was recognized by name. The exhibit itself features descriptions of everyone’s role, as well as reproductions of the awards they received.

Two months later, Hester left the service – largely, public af-fairs officers with the Kentucky Guard say, because of the constant demands from news media for her time.

“She’s a soldier and a cop, not a media person,” says Dave Al-ton, a civilian PAO for the Guard. She now works as a police officer some-where in Tennessee.

As much as Hester eschews the limelight, Vaught believes her ex-ploits mark a major milestone in the history of military women’s contribu-tions to the nation.

“Regardless of her personal feel-ings, the fact remains [that] it was a significant event,” Vaught says. “She was there as a woman in di-rect combat, and more than upheld her end. She was a leader in saving lives. That’s the first time, to the best of our knowledge, there has ever been an incident like that.”

Heroism Under FireTwo years after the Salman Pak incident, Spc. Monica Brown

was riding in a convoy in the Jani Khail district of Afghani-stan’s Paktika province when insurgents launched a fierce attack with small-arms and grenades. The 19-year-old combat medic from the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based 782nd Brigade Support Bat-talion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, was right in the middle.

After an improvised explosive device struck the vehicle be-

hind hers, Brown’s platoon sergeant yelled to her, “Doc, let’s go!”

“Everyone was already out of the burning vehicle,” Brown later said in an interview with American Forces Press Service, “but even before I got there, I could tell that two of them were injured very seriously.”

With the assistance of soldiers from the damaged vehicle who were less severely in-jured. Brown immediately began working on their two badly hurt comrades – Stanson Smith and Larry Spray, both specialists. Meanwhile, rounds from small-arms fire continued to whiz past her, miss-ing by inches.

“Another vehicle had just ma-neuvered to our position to shield us from the rounds now exploding in the fire from the Humvee behind us,” Brown said in the AFPS interview. “Somewhere in the mix, we started taking mortar rounds. It became a huge commotion, but all I could let myself think about were my patients.”

In time, soldiers maneuvered another vehicle into a position where they could transfer Smith and Spray into them, move to a safer lo-cation and call for a medical evacuation. She continued to work on the soldiers while instructing others who assisted by hold-

ing intravenous fluid bags. The attack ended some two hours after it began; the medevac helicopter arrived and picked up Smith and Spray.

Both survived.Vice President Dick Cheney pinned

the Silver Star on Brown’s chest dur-ing a March 20, 2007, ceremony at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan.

“Looking back, it was just a blur of noise and movement. What just hap-pened? Did I do everything right? It

was a hard thing to think about,” Brown told AFPS.Brown remains on active duty. She is still assigned to the

same unit and would be hard to distinguish from any other sol-dier stationed at Bragg – except, perhaps, for the ribbon on her chest.

The precedents both women set, Vaught says, obliterate ob-stacles that would otherwise hinder future military women who wish to prove that they can meet a challenge or opportunity.

Both validate “the argument that there is a place for women in combat when they are trained and capable,” Vaught says.

Both women, she says, received the recognition their acts deserved – not because they were female, because of what they did.

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Innovations revolutionizediagnosis and treatment

of combat injuries

By David Perera

Air Force pararescueman Jason Cunningham saved at least 10 lives on an Afghan mountain-top in 2002 after their MH-47 Chinook crash-

landed under heavy fire while on an ill-fated rescue mis-sion during Operation Anaconda. He continued treating the wounded even after being shot through the lower back by a bullet that would drain the life out of him before a medevac helicopter could get to the chaotic scene.

Senior Airman Cunningham posthumously was awarded the Air Force’s highest honor, the Air Force Cross, in recog-nition of his bravery and sacrifice. But Cunningham’s death also stands as a reminder that blood loss continues to kill soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who could have sur-vived if the bleeding had been stopped on the battlefield.

Similar scenes played out in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 when soldiers were pinned down by Somali gun-fighters, in Vietnam before the choppers could land, in wars stretching back millennia.

One problem was medics couldn’t carry sufficient amounts of blood for frontline care because blood spoils quickly when unprotected. They could stuff gauze bandages into wounds and apply pressure, but in many cases they could only watch someone with curable wounds die. Better body armor helps, of course, but it also has concentrated dev-astating wounds to the arms and legs.

New tourniquets that can be applied with one hand are replacing old-fashioned belt tourniquets like this one.


Battlefield Medicine

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The M-Turbo provides unprecedented durability with high performance image resolution in the toughest of environments.

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“When somebody gets blown up, they can have sometimes two, three, maybe all four extremities terribly injured or ampu-tated in the field, and they will bleed to death before they get to us,” said Air Force Maj. Gary Vercruysse, a theater hospital trauma surgeon deployed in Balad, Iraq.

But new options now avail-able to battlefield medics are beginning to change that.

A second-generation blood-clotting bandage coated with coagulant material can stop the bleeding. Medics can now carry blood in heat- and cold-resistant boxes that allow them to give transfusions on the bat-tlefield. And a new generation of redesigned tourniquets is saving limbs -- and lives.

“The simplest of devices sometimes makes the great-est difference,” said Col. Dal-las Hack, director of the Army Medical Research and Materiel Command’s combat casualty care research program.

Surviving Blood LossMedics and battlefield doctors have a slew of technologies im-

proving the odds of survival. Forward surgical teams have laptop-sized digital imaging systems. Rugged anesthesia machines much smaller than hospital ver-sions put soldiers under for sur-gery. Wounds vacuum-sealed rather than sewn shut let sur-geons treat battle casualties with a series of operations instead of a single, stamina-testing marathon surgery. New pain-blockers re-lieve suffering without risk of ad-diction. Databases track soldiers’ treatment from the front line to Landstuhl Regional Medical Cen-ter in Germany and the hospitals in the United States, giving each physician fingertip access to their patients’ record of treatment.

But the major cause of pre-ventable death remains blood

loss. With casualties continuing to pile up in two ongoing wars, finding ways to stop the bleeding in the battlefield has become a top priority of military medicine and private industry partners.

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Medical personnel carry an injured airman on a litter during an exercise simulating battlefield conditions. The medics are taking part in training, directed by the 3790th Medical Service Training Wing, that prepares personnel for treating the injured in a combat zone environment.

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After the casualties of Operation Anaconda, the Army was new-ly determined to solve the problem of blood transportation. Walter Reed Army Institute of Research officials tasked industry with find-ing a way to transport blood under extreme temperatures and keep it fresh for 24 hours. The transport mechanism had to maintain an internal temperature between 33 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit while the ambient temperature cooled to minus 4 degrees or heated up to 104 degrees. It also had to weigh no more than 6 pounds and con-tain no active machinery.

“They showed us pictures of these soldiers – it’s like they’re car-rying a house. Every ounce counts,” said George Flora, co-founder of Minnesota Thermal Science, a startup company formed specifi-cally to develop a blood-transportation solution.

The small company decided at first to concentrate on designing a temperature-resistant box. It didn’t quite work, in part because the prototype used water as a cooling agent. “They came back and told us we were half a [Celsius] degree too cold,” Flora recalled. The company went to work on a new solution, this time develop-ing a proprietary fluid that would keep the internal box temperature stable. The key was to find a fluid resistant to temperature change – it takes 136 units of heat measured in British Thermal Units to convert liquid water to steam – and that would freeze at a precise temperature.

Following months of experimentation, the company sent the in-stitute a new prototype. It worked. “Then they said, George, can you make it last 48 hours?” Flora said. Later, they asked for a 72-hour model. The final product can keep blood fresh up to 93 hours in extreme cold and 82 hours in extreme heat, he added.

“We gave them as much as we could get in a 6-pound box,” Flora said. In 2003, Army Special Forces officially adopted the company’s box for blood transportation. In 2004, the Army named the company’s work one of the preceding year’s 10 greatest inven-tions.

Throughout the process, the company worked closely with the Walter Reed Institute, Flora said. They did whatever they could to assist, “so that we were informed and that we weren’t just being shoved on some back shelf.”

Magic BandagesA similar story of collaboration underpins a second-generation

blood-clotting bandage called Combat Gauze, manufactured by Wallingford, Conn.-based Z-Medica. The Army announced Oct. 15 it is buying 270,000 packages for the field.

The story begins with Z-Medica’s first product aimed at staunch-ing blood loss, granules of a volcanic mineral applied directly into wounds. Revolutionary when introduced to the battlefield in 2002, Z-Medica’s product was 100 percent effective at stopping hemor-rhage. But it had nasty side effects, including second-degree burns caused by the physical reaction between the mineral and water mol-ecules.

Then, in 2003, University of California-Santa Barbara scientist Galen Stucky got a call from the Office of Naval Research. A chem-ist dedicated to studying interactions between inorganic molecules and organic matter, Stucky had research experience with the Z-Medica mineral. Navy researchers wanted to know if he could do

something about the heat reaction, ideally within six months. Stucky went to work and came up with a solution relatively

quickly. “But we paid a price for that,” he said. The new product was only 80 percent to 90 percent effective, a large enough margin of fallibility to send Stucky on a new round of government-funded research. To come up with a better solution, he would have to un-derstand exactly how to best trigger the cascading effect of blood clotting. Stucky wasn’t the only researcher examining how to in-duce clotting, but other efforts focused on blood proteins, a more expensive route. Stucky and his team of researchers zeroed in on investigating the properties of metal oxides.

“Once we understood what were the key parameters, then we were able to say, ‘OK, I know what kind of material we need.’ ” That turned out to be a common clay mineral called kaolin.

Coming up with a solution wasn’t just a matter of laboratory experimentation. Promising products found by Stucky’s team were sent to the Naval Medical Research Center for animal testing. “The in vivo tests are very expensive and they’re time-consuming. Con-sequently, we had to be careful that we gave them good sugges-tions,” he said.

Meanwhile, Z-Medica was working on the problem as well. “It

Army Spcs. Lisa Dueker (left) and Cecilia Morales work on an Iraqi soldier wounded by gunfire in Mahmudiyah.

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was also an issue that we were asking caregivers to pour granules into a wound, which was never done,” said Bart Gullong, chair-man of the Z-Medica board. The presence of granules in the body made wound healing awkward and there was the danger of pouring in too much, causing severe burns.

The company responded by pack-aging granules into a “tea bag,” then into a sponge. After Stucky hit on ka-olin, however, Z-Medica managed to impregnate the clotting agent directly into gauze.

“The gauze was a brilliant way to go,” Stucky said. And there’s no way he could have devised it himself, he added.

“I can come up with something on the bench stoop but that isn’t going to do the soldier any good on the field. It’s got to get to him, somehow, in a useful form. I’m not set up here to do packaging, do marketing or do manufacturing,” he said.

Old Method, New FormAsk military doctors for an important battlefield medicine inno-

vation and one of the first things they’ll mention is the tourniquet,

first used in battle in the 1800s but eventually falling out of favor. But 7 to 10 percent of battlefield deaths in Vietnam and Somalia were caused by profusely bleeding arm or leg wounds and could

likely have been averted by use of a tourniquet, according to the Defense Department.

“They had a Army tourniquet from World War II, used it for 50 years, and the reports from World War II said they didn’t work so well,” said Col. John Kragh, an Army Medical Corps orthopedic surgeon and proponent of the devices. Mounting groundswell support for tourniquets, intensified by soldiers’ tendency to buy them through the Internet because the military’s basic training strap-and-buckle unit clearly fell short, led to

a re-evaluation. In 2004, the Army Institute of Surgical Research decided to test

commercially available products. It recommended acquiring the Combat Application Tourniquet, distributed by Greer, S.C.-based North American Rescue Products AT.

The CAT, invented by former serviceman Mark Esposito of Golden, Colo., is designed for single-handed application so a soldier

“The simplest of devices sometimes

makes the greatest difference.”

— Col. Dallas HackDirector, Army combat

casualty care research program

can put it on himself. The Army surgeon general facilitated widespread re-introduction in 2005. Now, the CAT is part of every soldier’s standard field issue.

The device consists of an inner and outer band: The outer band wraps the tourniquet around the wounded limb while a rod tightens the inner band to cut off circulation.

“The bad devices aren’t commonly used any more, and the effective ones are is-sued,” Kragh said. The Combat Application Tourniquet won an Army Greatest Inven-tion of 2005 award.

When Kragh was deployed to Bagdad’s Ibn Sina Hospital in 2006, he used a reus-able, pneumatic tourniquet made by Vancouver, Canada-based Delfi Medical Innova-tions during surgery. He communicated often with Delfi about ways the company could improve the product – small changes, he said, that nonetheless made a big difference.

For one thing, a cap on the pneumatic bladder fell off easily. “It being the same color as the floor, you couldn’t see it,” he said, and the surgical team wasted time scrambling for it on the floor when a patient was bleeding to death. Kragh recommended that the cap be attached with a leash. He also wanted the tourniquet to open with less force. “They changed the [clamp] arc to be gentler, so there’s less force, more roll, to open up the tourniquet,” he said.

“They were fairly minor things, so we were able to get them out within a few months,” said Delfi President Mike Jameson.

New FrontiersIf many of today’s advances sound prosaic – even though they’re anything but –

potential advances sound like the stuff of science fiction. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced Sept. 29 it signed

a contract with Siemens Healthcare to develop a portable device that would staunch deep limb wound bleeding using ultrasound waves – a kind of high-tech tourni-quet.

A cuff-like device would first search for bleeding and then send a concentrated dose of high-intensity ultrasound waves prompting quick coagulation. Focused ultrasound has already proven effective during animal tests. The directed energy raises tissue temperature, causing it to shrink and small blood vessels to collapse. Tests show tissue can be safely heated to between 158 and 194 degrees Fahrenheit within 30 seconds. The device’s acoustic properties also appear to push blood away from the injured area.

DARPA has already developed automated bleed detection algorithms. Siemens said it should develop a prototype within 18 months.

Meanwhile, SRI International of Menlo Park, Calif., wants more DARPA fund-ing to move forward with what could be the most futuristic medical addition to the battlefield: a robot doctor.

“Ideally the system would be completely automatic, autonomous, making its

The Trauma Pod Operating Suite (surgery room)

PHOTO: Courtesy of SRI International

AcuTemp.com/Military

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own therapeutic decisions,” said Thomas Low, SRI director of medical devices and robotics. With $12 million in DARPA fund-ing, SRI conducted a two-year research and development project ending in March 2007 and now is lobbying for

“substantially more” funds, Low added. The idea of a robot medic – which SRI and DARPA call a “Trau-

ma Pod” – becomes a lot more believable when it’s described as a machine that recognizes patterns and does something simple as a result, such as putting a needle to a target. “This is not blue sky,”

Low said.“We can address a number of serious battlefield injuries, tempo-

rarily. We’re not trying to do definitive surgery,” he said. “We’re not trying to install on a machine the intelligence of a surgeon.”

Still, a robot could probably do better with some front-line procedures than a soldier operating under high-stress conditions, Low said. He cites a crico-thyrotomy as an example; it involves puncturing a large-bore hollow needle into a patient’s neck when the airway is obstructed. Frontline medics are somewhat reluctant to perform a cricothyrotomy “and don’t do particularly well under fire,” he said. But a robot given an image of the airway can do so easily. “It’s putting a needle to a target, based on imagery,” he said.

The first two years of the project were just the first phase of a research and development effort that could last up to a decade, Low said. So far, the Trauma Pod team successfully demonstrated a surgical procedure being controlled remotely by humans.

Robots already exist in the surgery theater, Low noted. And, he said, automated external defibrillator devices in public places let laymen treat heart attacks with electric shocks by monitoring a vic-tim’s heart rhythm and firing at the right moment.

“Certainly it’s better than the alternative of dying,” he said.

In World War II, 30 percent of the Americans injured in combat died, according to Defense Department fig-

ures. In Vietnam, the proportion dropped to 24 percent. During the early years of Iraq and Afghanistan, about 10 percent the injured died, according to a December 2004 New England Journal of Medicine article. Col. Mark Mavity, com-mander of the Balad Air Force Theater Hospital, said the in-the-ater survival rate in Iraq has always been at least 95 percent and recently has edged closer to 98 percent.

Odds of Survival

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Other therapists andphysicians pointed to theflexibility they are given to treata spectrum of ailments. Themilitary provides staff with thetraining and certification to doseveral tasks.

So rather than just being ableto order an X-ray, for example, atherapist could order it, read itand send the patient toorthopedics, said Capt. DoraQuilty, an occupational therapist.

The barrier of health insuranceknown to plague civilian doctorsis absent in the military setting.That frees up military doctorsand paves the way for them tooffer the most state-of-the-arttreatments, staff members said.

Amputees were getting thelatest version of the C-Leg – ahigh-tech computerized artificialleg created by Otto Bock – thesame day it went on the market,Janze said.

“The military takes care of itspeople,” Janze said.

For Quilty, the motivation tocome to work each day isintensely personal.

Her husband, Capt. ScottQuilty, lost an arm and a leg andspent two years at Walter Reedrecovering. She wants thepatients she sees to live the lifeher husband now enjoys.

“Everyone deserves a chancefor the way they want to live. Ifwe come in here and do our jobs,we are giving them all the toolsthey need to get where they wantto be,” she said.

Dora Quilty works withpatients at Fort Independence, aminiature apartment set up in theoccupational therapy wing. Acomplete kitchen and a livingroom with a couch, chairs andtable provide the setting forrecovering soldiers to relearnskills needed for daily living.Working in a familiar setting alsocan help soldiers suffering fromPost Traumatic Stress Disorder

Occupational therapist technician Capt. DoraQuiltyʼs husband recovered at Walter Reed after

losing an arm and a leg in combat.

DS08_vol3:Layout 1 8/20/08 11:00 AM Page 79

The Hero Miles program is grateful to our generous partners, including: AirTran Airways Alaska Airlines American Airlines Continental Airlines Delta Air Lines Frontier Airlines Midwest Airlines Northwest Airlines United Airlines US Airways

Hero Miles is a program of the nonprofit Fisher House Foundation. More information on the Foundation can be found at www.fisherhouse.org.

©2007 Fisher House Foundation / Brendan Mattingly Photography / Don Schaaf & Friends, Inc.

The Hero Miles program reunites families during times of tragedy by providing

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become a hero to a hero

PFC Matthew Zajac, US Army, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colorado and his father, Mike, photographed at a Fisher House in San Antonio, Texas.

PFC Matthew Zajac, US Army, 2nd Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colorado and his father, Mike, photographed at a Fisher House in San Antonio, Texas.

FH_HeroMiles_FINAL.indd 1 11/27/07 11:37:55 AM

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20


The U.S. and the Philippines

Old alliesjoin forcesfor waron terror

By Tom Breen

(Top) An Army Special Operations soldier leads a security assistance training session for Armed Forces of the Philippines troops.

(Middle) U.S. Army Col. David Fridovich, right, stands alongside Maj. Gen. Ernesto Carolina, commander of the Philippines’ South-ern Command, during a ceremony in Zamboanga City.

PHOTO: Petty Officer First Class Edward G. Martens

PHOTO: JO2(SW) Stacy Young

(Bottom) U.S. forces and Filipino soldiers during the Balikatan joint military exercises at Crow Valley in Tarlac province, north of Manila.

PHOTO: Philippine Information Agency

News Analysis

Nearly 20 years after the United States shut down its bases in the Philippines, the American military has forged a strik-

ing new presence in the Southeast Asian archipelago of 7,100 islands and nearly 100 million people.

From the mountains of northern Luzon to the jungles and pineapple plantations of Mindanao and elsewhere in the south, American forces continue to train Philippine soldiers and police to contend with a decades-old Islamic insurgency, as well as building bridges, schools and roads to win civilian support and assist the Philippine government. In addition, the United States rushes in to help when natural di-sasters occur, such as in June 2008 when hundreds died in a ferry-boat accident. Under orders from President Bush, the U.S. contributed supplies and food in the rescue efforts.

In short, the U.S.-Philippines relationship is as strong as it was during the Cold War days.

In moving back into the Philippines, U.S. forces not only help control an insurgency that has some links to Al Qaeda, although in reality is far less potent than in the Middle East, but have produced a forward-basing operation that serves U.S. interests throughout the region.

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STORIES FROMTHE BATTLEFIELD

Beginning a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by ter-rorists on the U.S. mainland, the American military has rotated in scores of troops to the Philippines, although only 1,000 or less re-main at any one time, according to a range of sources here and in the Philippines. The numbers may be small, but the U.S. influence is large, adds an American military source who pointed to an exer-cise in June in which hundreds of American and Filipino forces, in-cluding U.S. Navy SEALS, worked together with few operational flaws. This is a country that likes and welcomes Americans; this place is not Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan.

Since early 2002 when American forces began arriving anew in the archipelago, special operations and regular troops, in addition to

training Filipino soldiers and police, on occasion have joined with them to hunt down Islamic rebels, even though local law forbids such missions. A Philippine senator, Rodolfo Biazon, acknowl-edged the reports that Americans have accompanied Filipinos on combat missions but called them “pure speculation.” Biazon, a for-mer chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines who has trained at Fort Bragg, N.C., added in an interview that he welcomes the growing U.S. presence and their help in handling the local Is-lamic insurgency.

Lt. Gen. Nelson Allaga, chief of the country’s Western Mind-anao Command, echoed Biazon’s comments when he told the Min-danao Examiner newspaper recently that “we soldiers are benefit-ing from the training that the [Americans] are conducting for us.” He added that most civilians support the military and infrastructure projects spearheaded by Americans.

U.S. troops, for their part, are situated mostly in western Mind-anao island south of Manila, on the islands of Basilan and Jolo and throughout the Sulu archipelago, where most of the Muslim popu-lation live. Some training, however, also takes place on the main island of Luzon, because Muslim insurgents have staged attacks in Manila from time to time.

The Islamic insurgents mostly operate under the banners of three groups --- the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Moro National

Liberation Front and the more extreme Abu Sayyaf. The Islamic rebellion is responsible for thousands of deaths since the 1940s, when the U.S. government granted the Philippines its indepen-dence. Moro is the Spanish word for Arab. Islamic clerics from the Middle East introduced the religion to the country several hundred years ago. By the time Spaniards reached Manila in 1571, the city was controlled by Muslim leaders. As for Abu Sayyaf, it report-edly began in the mid-1990s with funds from Osama Bin Laden’s brother-in-law, and, since then, has forged ties with Jemaah Islami-yah, an Al Qaeda branch responsible for bombing tourist spots in Bali, Indonesia.

The current U.S. counterinsurgency mission in the archipelago is far different than it was during the Cold War years when thou-sands of American forces occupied two major bases and several smaller operations. Then, the United States used the Philippines to counter a possible Soviet threat throughout the region, devot-ing only minimal effort to helping battle communist and Muslim insurgencies in the country. Neither uprising at the time was con-sidered by the Americans to be a major threat in the 1980s and 1990s.

But even with a reduced presence, the American military once again clearly has become part of the Philippine cultural and secu-rity landscape. Also, unlike the Middle East, American troops can venture into public, usually without fear, and without body armor because Filipinos generally are fond of Americans, said longtime Philippine analyst Sol Jose Vanzi, based in Manila. Also, the Is-lamic insurgency in the Philippines is far less organized than it is in the Middle East, Vanzi and others said.

The largest American presence is on Mindanao. There, Ameri-can troops often can be spotted flying in and out of the country, especially into Zamboanga on the western tip of the island, where the United States has a makeshift basing operation. On Mind-

anao, Muslims make up about 20 percent of the population, while only 5 percent throughout the country. Mindanao long has been the center of the Muslim drive for independence, sometimes a peaceful effort, often not.

In October, scores of replacement troops -- under the direc-tion of U.S. Army Col. Bill Coultrup, the head of Joint Special Operations Task Force - Philippines -- were seen swooping into the Zamboanga area. The troops were assigned to replace forces already in place in the Philippines, some of them arriving on Air Force C-17 Globemasters and C-130 Hercules, and others aboard commercial flights.

“Our troops look forward to working with, and learning, from the AFP,” as the Armed Forces of the Philippines is known, Coul-trup told Philippine reporters at the time. From a briefing room in-side his operation’s headquarters at the Philippine military’s Camp Navarro in Zamboanga, Coultrup later told the National Defense Industrial Association, “If we weren’t here, terrorist training camps would have a chance of flourishing in this area, and that’s what we’re trying to prevent. All you need is a few good [terrorist] train-ers who can create the next round of suicide bombers.”

And while the stated reason, by Coultrup and others, for the U.S. presence has been to help Philippine troops stave off the decades-long Muslim insurgency in the south that has been buoyed some-what by Al Qaeda since 9/11, a DEFENSE STANDARD analysis

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U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force–Philippines commander Col. William Coultrup speaks to the media during a press briefing in Zamboanga City.

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Manila

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Although no Islamic insurgency operates in the capital, some attacks occur there from time to time, and U.S. troops train around Manila and elsewhere on Luzon.

This island, south of Manila, is the heart of the Islamic independence movement. 20 percent of the population is Muslim, compared with 5 percent in the country as a whole. The Zamboanga area has the highest concentration of insurgents. The U.S. is building up its presence at Camp Navarro in Zamboanga City.

Many violent incidents, including attacks on Filipino troops, have occurred throughout the Sulu Archipelago, including the island provinces of Jolo and Basilan.

Luzon

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Manila✪

Basilan

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Zamboanga City

CAMP NAVARRO

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Sulu Sea

Countering Terrorism

The Philippines

Luzon

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Manila✪

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Zamboanga City

CAMP NAVARRO

PacificOcean

Sulu Sea

Post 9/11, the U.S. maintains about 1,000 troops in the Philippines, in part to help counter a small Islamic independence movement and build a regional forward-basing operation. Areas of concern include:

Luzon

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Zamboanga City

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Sulu Sea

Areas of high insurgent activity

Areas of scattered insurgent activity


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indicates that the United States also has furthered U.S. security in-terests by:

• Positioning American troops on the ground in the Philippines to monitor the Muslim insurgency not only there, but across Asia, where the governments in such spots as Indonesia and Malaysia frown upon the presence of American forces. The Philippines also serves as a key spot for American forces, and intelligence opera-tives, to receive tips about terrorist operations throughout the Mid-dle East because millions of Filipinos work in that region, and often pass information to relatives at home, analyst Vandi said.

• Providing military protection for American and British oil workers laboring aboard rigs in the South China and Celebes Sea.

• Laying the groundwork for the possible opening of new per-manent bases in the Philippines, if needed, by positioning troops and equipment in country over a six-year period and aiding on local infrastructure projects.

• Covertly taking soldiers from the Philippine military from time to time after training them, and placing them in terrorist-fighting trouble spots such as Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in Asia, according to American trainers. In the last year, for example, Ma-rines from the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, at Kaneohe in Hawaii trained one unit of about 35 Philippine Marines that is intended to be used in covert operations beyond the archipelago.

“I am told that Filipino soldiers in this group are rugged and fit and can fight anywhere,” said a Marine who is in direct contact with

the U.S. trainers. The Marine added that American and Philippine soldiers work easily together, minus language and cultural barriers.

On a geopolitical scale, U.S. ties to the country’s military have remained strong even in the wake of the Philippine Senate’s 1991 rejection of the Philippines-U.S. Military Bases Agreement, result-ing in the closure of all U.S. military bases in the country. Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay Naval Station, both north of Manila, were the largest. The closings -- which took place only a few years after the toppling of Ferdinand Marcos by the “People Power Revolu-tion” in 1986 -- came about because the post-Marcos government felt obliged to focus on the country’s sovereignty.

The government’s decision also appeased leaders of a commu-nist guerrilla movement that had been percolating, and erupting from time to time, mostly on the main island of Luzon since the 1950s. “The smartest thing to do,” mostly to quiet the communist insurgency, was to ask the United States to shut down its bases, one Philippine analyst says. “But the truth is that most Filipinos always felt more secure with the American presence, not only for military reasons, but for economic reasons.” Indeed, Clark and Subic Bay pumped millions of dollars into the Philippine economy.

The Muslim insurgency was another matter. Even before the United States granted the Philippines its independence in 1946, Muslim groups had been rebelling against the central government for independence in the south; most of the Muslim population had settled through the decades in islands far south of Manila, the coun-

try’s largest city, which now has about 10 million residents. Through the years, Muslim groups, operating from the south, often have been tied to violence that extended as far as Manila and beyond.

Thus, when the 9/11 attacks occurred, Filipinos worried about a violent reaction from the insurgents, spurred on by Al Qaeda, wel-comed U.S. military assistance, whether in the form of financial assistance or training.

Since then, the U.S. military certainly has assisted the coun-try’s military and police fighting Muslim insurgents in the south. Even more importantly, the U.S. has taken the opportunity to store equipment in the country, from Humvees and aircraft to weapons and grenades.

“In effect, the United States has informally set up base op-erations without signing agree-ments,” says Rodger Baker, a mil-itary analyst at Stratfor, a private intelligence company in Texas. “In 2002, when the U.S. went rushing in there, it was initially with an understanding that Abu Sayyaf had real links to Al Qaeda. But the U.S. very quickly figured that Al Qaeda was not a massive threat in the Philippines, and that the country itself does not fit in with the overall Islamic country.”

Indeed, Filipino Muslims seem more attuned to Christian culture in the Philippines, where about 90 percent of the nation is Roman Catholic, than to Islam. Muslim women, for example, often forgo veils, or other coverings, in favor of blouses and jeans, and men and women generally do not seem as devoted to such rituals as calls to prayers and other Islamic customs. Actually, Baker and others say, the Muslim independence movement has more to do with econom-ics than with religiosity, because Muslims feel economically isolated from the central government in Manila.

Regardless of the movement’s underpinnings, violent incidents emerge from time to time, including the slaying of two Americans and a Filipino nurse kidnapped at Dos Palmos resort on the island of Palawan several years ago and killed in the rebel stronghold of Basilan island.

These days, however, the Muslim unrest has mostly qui-eted, which means, analyst Bak-er says, that the setting up of a forward-basing operation in the Philippines occupies American military thinking far more than does the fight against Muslim terrorists.

In the end, clearly, a continu-ing presence in the Philippines comes with few risks and nu-merous benefits for the United States. Since 2002, when the United States returned to the

Philippines, casualties have been minimal, with few injuries and one combat death reported. In

addition, the overall cultural milieu of the country allows U.S. forces to conduct training there without fearing constantly for their safety.

In Mindanao, for example, Americans often are seen socializ-ing with Filipinos, sharing a San Miguel beer or two along with the area’s bountiful seafood. Sometimes, Americans even are observed singing with Filipino soldiers in a country where virtually every resident possesses a solid singing voice. (The joke once was that the daughter of former President Corazon Aquino, who helped topple Marcos, was the only Filipina with a bad voice.).

In short, even with the long-standing Muslim rebellion still festering in the south, the Philippines offers a haven for the American military to forge a forward-basing operation that re-sembles, at least in part, the permanent bases of Clark and Subic Bay in years past.

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Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, answers questions during an all-hands call with service mem-bers assigned to Camp Navarro in the Philippines.

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The fall of 2001 following the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11 was a busy time for

the U.S. military, as they set out on their first overseas efforts to hunt down Al Qaeda and its affiliate terrorist or-ganizations. Most Americans recall the liberation of Afghanistan in an impres-sive seven-week campaign that ended in Taliban surrender at the gates of Kandahar. However, there was another counter-terrorism campaign being fought at the same time, fought in and among the islands and jungles of the Philippine Ar-chipelago. This was Operation Enduring Freedom – Philippines (OEF-P), and it remains one of the most successful counterinsur-gency operations run during the first years of the Global War on Terrorism.

Setting the StageEven before Spain had ceded the island territory to the U.S, an

ongoing insurgency was being waged by Muslims in the southern Philippines against the predominately Catholic-based government in Manila. Tribes like the Moros, based on islands like Mindanao, Basilan, and Jolo, regularly rose up against U.S. occupation forces. Following World War II, the insurgency largely was kept in control by the repressive policies of dictator Ferdinand Marcos. His fall at the end of the Cold War, however, allowed the Muslim insurgents to begin anew.

Throughout the 1990s, the Muslim groups, including Abu Sayyaf (Arabic for “Father of Swordsmith”), were responsible for a number of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations, and other acts throughout the Philippines, including in Manila. Abu Sayyaf and other Filipino insurgent groups also entered into the growing radical Islam network that included Al Qaeda in the 1990s, taking a partnership role in operations. One such plan, by 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, to kill Pope John Paul II, bomb 12 airliners, and fly another airliner into CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., was supported by another Filipino Islamic insurgent group, Jemaah Islamiyah (Arabic for “Islamic Congregation”).

By the time of the 9/11 attacks, Abu Sayyaf and the other Is-

lamic insurgent groups in the southern Philippines had become such a threat that the Philippine government finally was willing to allow U.S. forces back into their country. It took most of a de-cade of discreet military-to-military contact between the U.S. and Filipino government to rebuild the relationship enough to enable a long-term deployment of trainers and advisers to the southern Philippines.

What became OEF-P actually was actually an extension to an existing bilateral training exercise, Balikatan (“shoulder-to-shoul-der”) 02-1, and continued a Mobile Training Team (MTT) mission that had predated 9/11. The planned OEF-P mission objectives were:

• Surveillance and control of Abu Sayyaf transit/supply routes, supporting villages and access to key personnel.

• Train with Filipino military and interior security forces to build professional skills and strengths.

• Support and advise operations by Filipino strike teams in the Southern Philippines.

• Eliminate the ability of Al Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf, and other ter-rorist groups to move through the Philippines to their desired tar-get areas throughout the world.

• Deny the terrorists direct or indirect support from sympathiz-ers, outside terrorist groups and supportive nation-states.

• Wage psychological and civil affairs campaigns to separate the insurgency from the local population.

In addition to deploying training and advisory personnel, the U.S. also began major transfers of surplus equipment and weap-ons. In 2002 alone, this included a C-130 Hercules transport plane, 5 UH-1 transport helicopters, 300 2 ½-ton trucks, a pair of 82-foot Point-class patrol cutters, and 15,000 M-16 combat rifles.


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The Evolution of Operation Enduring Freedom – Philippines

“Conduct security assistance operations to enhance interoperability between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and the armed forces of the United States. Support the AFP in their fight to deny and defeat terrorist activities….”

Mission Statement for Operation Enduring Freedom – Philippines

Joint Task Force 510For the first deployment of Joint Task Force (JTF) 510 in 2002,

the U.S. Pacific Command standing deployable Special Opera-tions Forces (SOFs) headquarters, the Special Operations Pacific commander Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald C. “Donnie” Wurster, had a variety of forces around which to build his Philippine force. While OEF-P I was planned as a training and advisory operation, that does not mean that the forces engaged were just a collection of rear-echelon schoolhouse personnel. Instead Wurster selected a hard core of 1,200 warfighters, composed mostly of Special Op-erations Forces (SOFs), including the following:

3rd Battalion/1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) – The core of the OEF-P training and advisement effort formed around 160 Special Forces soldiers (Green Berets). These were formed into a number of Operational Detachment Alphas (ODAs) of the 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) out of Fort Lewis, Wash. Built around 12-man teams with personnel trained in planning,

engineering, demolitions, communications, medical skills, and the local languages, ODAs specialize in military-to-military training and professional development, along with their own impressive combat skills.

SEAL Team Seven – Sea Air Land (SEAL) Team Seven, based at Coronado, Calif., contributed a number of SEALs and support personnel to provide a maritime component for OEF-P.

160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment – To support the overall OEF-P effort, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR – “the Nightstalkers”) supplied a small force of their highly modified helicopters, including the superb MH-47 Chinook.

353rd Special Operations Group – Based at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, the 353rd provided a variety of aircraft and personnel. These included HH-60G Pave Hawk search and res-cue helicopters, MC-130 tanker/transports, pararescue jumpers and combat air controllers.

112th Signals Battalion – Based at Fort Bragg, N.C., the 112th was the premier SOF communications provider of radio, satellite, telephonic and other communications bandwidth.

The rest of the U.S. military stepped up to provide small units and sometimes just individual specialists to flesh out JTF 510. These included Marines, Navy construction engi-neers, Army civil affairs and psychological warfare person-nel, medical teams, and of course, a solid base of intelligence professionals.

Early OperationsIn February 2002, JTF 510 began to flow into the southern

Philippines, joining their Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) counterparts from the Southern Command, commanded by Lt. Gen. Roy Cimatu. They began operations by establishing bases for logistics, training and communications. These included an air-field on Basilan Island built by a Navy mobile construction battal-ion, along with assorted forward operating locations. Along with the airfield on Basilan, JTF 510 built almost 50 miles of roads, im-proved a port facility and dug 25 new wells in just eight months. With the bases and supply lines established, JTF 510 went into a period of hard training and patrolling, getting everyone used to the operating areas of islands like Basilan, Mindanao and Jolo.

In addition, the operation had a significant “hearts and minds” component, including Operation Smiles. Operation Smiles was composed of 20 combined U.S./Filipino teams with medical personnel fanning out across Basilan providing health services to more than 18,000 civilians. They then conducted more than 20 Medical Civil Action Projects (MEDCAPs), which provided $100,000-plus in donated medical equipment and supplies, along with improving 14 schools, seven medical clinics, and three hos-pitals. In just one day in one village with a population of 1,200, JTF 510 MEDCAP personnel pulled 260 teeth, made 26 cataract referrals, and did 740 medical examinations.

While the JTF 510 and Philippine forces worked hard to win over the local populace, they had a more kinetic approach toward Abu Sayyaf and the other Islamic insurgent fighters. Over the pre-vious few years, Abu Sayyaf had financed their operations by kid-napping foreigners and collecting ransoms. Therefore, the initial U.S./Philippine response was an aggressive program of patrolling and intelligence collection, much of it coming from local citizens who preferred the attentions of the newly interested Manila gov-ernment to that of the insurgents. This was followed by a growing number of raids upon Abu Sayyaf camps and strongholds, which began to rapidly thin their ranks by the end of 2002.

Sadly, OEF-P I did not come without losses. On Feb. 22, 2002, a 160th SOAR MH-47 crashed on a flight between Basilan and Mactan, killing eight personnel. In addition, not all the raid opera-tions went perfectly, as was seen near Zamboanga on Mindanao when the AFP attacked an Abu Sayyaf camp trying to rescue a number of Western hostages. While a number of Abu Sayyaf in-surgents were killed and hostages freed, two American prisoners were killed. Overall, however, the successes of JTF 510 and its Philippine military partners opened the way for even more effec-tive operations in the years that followed.

In July 2002, JTF 510 transitioned into Joint Special Opera-tions Task Force – Philippines (JSOTF-P), reflecting the change to a long-term commitment to Operation Enduring Freedom. Today JSOTF-P continues to operate in the southern Philippines. Despite some ups and downs in the numbers and strengths of the various Islamic insurgent groups, Operation Enduring Freedom -- Philip-pines has been seen as an unqualified success. It also provides the U.S. and its allies with a template for future Global War on Terror campaigns, as America begins to move toward the second decade of the conflict.


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Despite some ups and downs in the numbers and strengths of the various Islamic insurgent groups, Operation Enduring Freedom - Philippines has been seen as an unqualified success.

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Competition for $35 billion contract on hold, but far from out of fuel

KC-X Tanker

(Left) Boeing’s first 767 tanker, destined for the Italian Air Force, achieved a milestone March 5 when it trans-ferred fuel to a B-52 for the first time in flight.

(Right) Northrop Grumman’s KC-45 tanker tested its refueling boom with an Airborne Warning and

Control System (AWACS) aircraft July 18 as Northrop and its European partner Airbus continued to press for a contract to build tankers for the U.S. Air Force.

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D-1, a khaki-colored, twin-engine A330, sits to-day on a Tarmac in Dresden, Germany, sealed tight against the weather, waiting. The grace-

ful giant of a jetliner was supposed to be the lead plane in a new generation of U.S. Air Force KC-45 refueling tankers.

European aircraft maker Airbus pulled the plane off its production line in Toulouse, France, just days after win-ning a $35 billion contract on Feb. 29, 2008, to build 179 refueling tankers for the Air Force. Airbus flew D-1 to Dresden on March 4 to begin the first stages of conver-sion into a refueling tanker.

But conversion work was halted before it even began. On March 11, Airbus’ arch rival, Boeing, filed a formal

protest of the contract award with the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The filing required the Air Force to issue Airbus a stop work order.

It was a last, desperate effort by Boeing to snatch back the lucrative Air Force tanker contract it has been trying to snag since 2002. And the protest paid off. On June 18, the GAO issued a 69-page decision siding with Boeing.

GAO contract examiners concluded that the Air Force “had made a number of significant errors that could have affected the outcome of what was a close competition be-tween Boeing and Northrop Grumman.”

Northrop was the American prime contractor in a part-nership with Europe’s EADS, the parent company of air-craft maker Airbus, in an often bitter two-year competi-tion against Boeing to win the tanker contract. Now the battle would have to be fought over again.

For the Air Force any tanker delay was bad news. The service flies more than 450 tankers that now average 47 years old. The GAO ruling seemed likely to delay the start of work on a new fleet of tankers for several months.

Then in September, bad news got worse. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the tanker competition would be postponed until a new presi-dent – and most likely a new defense secretary – is in office in 2009. Gates’ decision could push the first new tanker’s arrival back by as much as four years, estimates Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff.

The turn of events sparked outrage in Alabama, where a tanker contract victory for Northrop meant Airbus would build a new aircraft assembly plant at Brookley Field, a former World War II-era Air Force base in Mobile.

The plant itself would create 1,500 new jobs. And its demand for aircraft parts and other supplies and services was projected to create an additional 5,000 jobs, according to the Mobile Airport Authority, which owns the Brookley property.

Now all that was on hold.

Jobs BattleGates’ decision evoked a bitter blast from Sen.

Richard Shelby, R-Ala.“This was a blatant, politically motivated decision,

driven by the political and emotional hysteria gener-ated by members of Congress who wanted a Boeing win no matter what.” Shelby added, “It is now clear that acquiring the best tanker for the warfighter was less important than saving Boeing jobs.”

Boeing and its supporters, on the other hand, were ecstatic.

A new tanker competition “will ensure delivery of the right tanker to the U.S. Air Force and serve the best interests of the American taxpayer,” company officials said.

Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., whose district in-cludes Boeing’s big aircraft assembly plant in Ever-ett, hailed Gates’ decision as “great news for Boeing’s workers.” He urged the next president and defense secretary “to take into account how the tanker deci-sion will affect our defense industrial base.”

In theory, at least, the competition between Airbus and Boeing was supposed to determine which com-pany’s plane best met the Air Force’s needs. But both companies quickly focused on a more potent politi-cal issue: Jobs. And each aimed its sales pitches as much at Congress and the public as at the Air Force.

Boeing said if it won, building tankers would cre-ate or preserve 44,000 jobs building what was at one time called the KC-767. Many would be at Boeing plants, but many others would be at more than 300 companies in more than 40 states that would supply aircraft parts. Northrop pledged to create 48,000 jobs in 230 companies in 49 states.

Such promises raised the political stakes enormously.


KC-45

KC-767

Length

Boeing KC-767

Northrop Grumman

KC-45

192 ft 11 in159 ft 2 in

Wingspan 156 ft 1 in 197 ft 10 in

Passengers 190 226

Pallets 19 32

Max Fuel Loadmore than

200,000 lbs 250,000 lbs

Air Force KC-135

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The workhorse of the Air Force’s tanker fleet, the KC-135, has been operational since 1957. Here’s how the two competitors vying toreplace it compare with the current tanker:

By the Numbers

The Competitors

Height 52 ft 57 ft 1 in41 ft 7 in

SOURCE: boeing.com and northtropgrumman.com

The Tanker Competition

Today’s Tanker

How They Measure Up


Buying a new generation of

refueling tankers has been a top Air

Force priority – and stumbling block –

since 2002.

And politics now is blamed for the contract stalemate.

Industry DilemmaIn an appearance before the House Armed Services Commit-

tee, Gates said there is too little time left for the current admin-istration to hold a new tanker contest “that will be viewed as fair and competitive in this highly charged environment.”

Gates called for a “cooling-off period” and a new tanker competition overseen by the next administration.

In Alabama, “we try to stay optimistic,” said Claudia Zim-mermann of the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce. But the delay is a blow to companies statewide. Firms such as En-gelhard Specialty Chemicals of Huntsville, Westland Aero-space of Tallassee, and Goodrich of Foley had been gearing up to do business with Airbus.

“When did people decide that jobs in Seattle, Washington, are worth more than jobs here?” Alabama Gov. Bob Riley de-manded in a Sept. 25 address to Mobile-area Realtors.

But it’s not just Alabama jobs that are in abeyance. The tanker delay means uncertainty for companies across the coun-try. In Ohio, General Electric workers were to assemble the en-gines that would power the KC-45. Work is also suspended for California companies Sargent Fletcher, which makes refueling systems, and Parker Aerospace, which installs them. Smiths Aerospace of Grand Rapids, Mich., was to build aircraft flight management systems, and AAR Cargo Systems of Livonia, Mich., was to make the plane’s cargo loading equipment.

A few firms, such as Honeywell Aerospace and Rock-well Collins, were selected as major subcontractors by both Northrop and Boeing. For them, the question isn’t so much whether they will land tanker contracts, it’s when.

Phoenix-based Honeywell was to make the KC-45’s colli-sion avoidance systems and other avionics. Rockwell of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, was to supply the plane’s radio equipment.

New Design?While Northrop’s subcontractors stew, Gates’ order for a

new tanker competition revives the multibillion-dollar hopes of Boeing’s team, which includes Connecticut-based firms GE Aviation Systems and engine maker Pratt and Whitney; Dal-las-based Vought Aircraft; and engine component maker Spirit Aerosystems of Wichita, Kan.

“Boeing lives to fight another day,” said Christopher Hell-man, a military policy and budget analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

It might be a distant day. “The delay could easily exceed a full year,” Hellman said.

But that would give Boeing time to make major changes in its bid, perhaps proposing a larger aircraft, one closer in size to the Northrop-Airbus plane.

Boeing’s tanker was based on its 767-200 aircraft, a mid-size, wide body, twin-engine airliner. In commercial use since 1982, the 767-200 is 159 feet long and has a 156-foot wing-span. As a tanker, it can carry about 200,000 pounds of fuel.

The Airbus plane, a modified A330-200, is 196 feet long and

has wings that span 198 feet and can carry 250,000 pounds of fuel. The A330 dates to 1993.

The A330 can offload fuel more quickly and can carry more cargo than the 767, factors that the Air Force appears to have favored. The GAO later ruled that the Air Force had weighed those capabilities unfairly against Boeing.

The GAO also said the Air Force erred “by informing Boe-ing that it had fully satisfied a key performance parameter ob-jective relating to operational utility, but later determined that Boeing had only partially met this objective.”

Amazingly, the Air Force didn’t tell Boeing of this revised opinion, the GAO said.

On other contract matters, the GAO said the Air Force had been sloppy, but not necessarily wrong.

In September, John Young, the Pentagon’s under-secretary for ac-quisition, technol-ogy and logistics, revealed another factor that led the Air Force to select the Northrop-Air-bus tanker: Airbus wanted $12.5 bil-lion for the first 68 aircraft, compared with Boeing’s $15.4 bil-lion bid. Young said that the smaller Boeing tanker should have been cheaper, not more expensive than its larger Airbus rival.

But Young, too, conceded that the Air Force did a poor job of explaining its priorities to Boeing, and that was pivotal in Boeing’s bid protest.

Unending ControversyBuying a new generation of refueling tankers has been a top

Air Force priority – and stumbling block – since 2002. That year, the Air Force arranged with Boeing to lease 100

refueling tankers in a deal that reached $29 billion in lease costs and maintenance contracts.

The deal was approved by three of four needed congres-sional committees before it was assailed as overpriced and blocked in the Senate Armed Services Committee by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

A subsequent investigation uncovered contract impropri-eties that led to prison sentences for former Air Force weapons buyer Darleen Druyun, who was hired by Boeing after approv-ing the lease deal, and Boeing’s chief financial officer, Michael Sears, who hired Druyun. Boeing also hired two of Druyun’s relatives.

Stung by the “Boeing tanker scandal,” the Air Force was forced to start over. This time it decided to use competition to ensure fairness in the selection of a new refueling tanker.

But controversy continued to dog the tanker program. The contest between Boeing and Northrop quickly grew rancor-ous.


Each company accused the other of receiving illegal gov-ernment subsidies. Each claimed the other used more foreign components. Boeing claimed to have 50 years of experience build-ing tankers, but Airbus derided Boe-ing’s entrant as “a paper airplane,” insisting that a successful tanker based on the 767 had yet to fly.

Using different measures, each company claimed to offer “a better value for the warfighter.”

Vitriol increased with each new development -- Northrop’s win in February, Boeing’s protest in March, the GAO’s ruling in June and then Gates’ decision in September.

Last summer Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., blocked Sen-ate confirmation of Michael Don-ley to be Air Force secretary. She cited her dissatisfaction with the Air Force decision not to award the tanker contract to Boeing.

In September, Shelby, Alabama’s senior senator, charged that Gates’ decision to cancel the Northrop contract and order a new competi-tion “clearly placed politics and business interests above the inter-ests of the warfighter.” Mobile’s con-gressman, Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Ala., said he was “outraged by the Department of Defense’s deci-sion to cancel this program,” and called it irresponsible in a time of war.

Fight or Compromise?Northrop, meanwhile, has tried to emphasize the positive. It was Air Force mistakes, not Airbus deficiencies, that

caused the contract to unravel, company officials stressed. “Nothing in the GAO report refutes the fact that the Northrop Grumman KC-45 is the most capable tanker and is ready now to go into production,” said Paul Meyer, Northrop’s vice pres-ident for air mobility systems.

Chief executive Ron Sugar vowed to “continue to pursue with determination and commitment the opportunity to ulti-mately provide a superior tanker product to our warfighters.”

And once again, Airbus and Boeing partisans began pre-paring for renewed battle.

In Mobile, Zimmermann of the Chamber of Commerce said “we keep supporting Northrop Grumman and EADS. We believe they have the best tanker. It’s been flown and tested and hopefully the Defense Department will be able to pick the product that they deem best.”

Asked in September if the Air Force’s next tanker will be

built in Alabama, Gov. Riley replied, “Absolutely.” But Boeing’s backers are equally adamant.

Rep. Norm Dicks, D-Wash., a long-time Boeing champion in the House, already has his battle plan. “It would also be my intention to assure that a new selection process correctly identifies the real Air Force require-ments and also takes into consider-ation factors such as the subsidies that are provided to Airbus aircraft by European governments, unfairly tak-ing jobs away from U.S. aerospace workers,” Dicks said Sept. 10.

From the adjacent congressio-nal district, Rep. Larsen pledged to “encourage a new administration to take into account how the tanker de-cision will affect our defense indus-trial base.” And Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., stated bluntly, “the Airbus tanker did not meet the Air Force’s needs.”

With the rival factions already rearming, is it possible to conduct a competition award a contract that will survive a challenge?

Probably not, said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the House De-

fense Appropriations Subcommittee. So he proposed a compromise: Buy

tankers from both companies.So far, the idea’s not very popular, even Murtha, D-Pa.,

concedes. “Boeing doesn’t like it, and I don’t know if Northrop likes

it. The Defense Department definitely doesn’t like it,” Murtha said. “But let me tell you something, we are not going to have tankers if we don’t do that, I’m convinced.” Unless both com-panies get to share the lucrative tanker deal, “there will be a protest no matter who wins the next competition.”

Murtha included language in the 2009 Defense Appropria-tions Act directing the Pentagon to study the feasibility of a “dual buy.”

Gates warned that a dual tanker buy would add billions of dollars to the program’s cost. The Defense Department would have to manage two procurement programs instead of one, and the Air Force would have to buy two sets of maintenance equipment and train two sets of maintainers, pilots and crew members.

Gates said he would recommend a presidential veto if Con-gress approves a dual tanker buy. But Gates is likely to be gone as defense secretary long before a dual buy could be arranged.

And Murtha and the congressional allies of Boeing and Air-bus will still be there.

A unique feature of the KC-767A is its refueling receptacle, shown on top of the plane’s forward section.

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Inside a modern headquarters building at Fort Belvoir, Va., Defense Logistics Agency officials hold a classified brief-ing each week to update their operations in support of a

globe-spanning U.S. military. Computer-generated maps track in real-time the lifeblood of military forces at war: fuel, food, cloth-ing, spare parts, medical supplies and construction materials. DLA Logistics Liaison Officers who are embedded with frontline forc-es in Iraq and Afghanistan report in over secure video and audio lines, alongside service logisticians. Commanders of DLA field activities covering Europe, the Pacific and the Middle East up-date a supply-and-demand equation that moves 5.2 million items, 54,000 requisitions and 8,200 contract actions each day.

If the weekly DLA operational updates resemble an Operations

Center mission brief at a major military command, the similarity is not coincidental. The demands of the post-9/11 era have thorough-ly transformed this onetime wholesale buying agent, warehouse “box kicker” and all-around bean counter. Today the DLA operates as a one-stop military supply chain manager supporting combat forces in far-flung theaters around the world.

“Our job is linking what the industrial and supply base can de-liver with what the warfighters need, when and where they need it, and there is an art to understanding both the commercial and military sides of that business,” said Claudia Knott, director of acquisition management at DLA. “Whether you’re talking food, fuel, spare parts or clothing, the U.S. armed services cannot go to war today without the Defense Logistics Agency.”

It wasn’t always so. While DLA has supported U.S. military forces in every conflict of the last 40 years, in the past it was large-ly viewed as a wholesale procurer of generic commodities like fuel and food, with little presence in operational theaters or understand-ing of “retail” military logistics where the rubber hits the off-ramp. In some cases, the service material and logistics commands even came to view DLA as a competitor. Sure it was able to use its posi-tion as the bulk buying agent for all the armed services to leverage low costs on some commodities, but what did DLA really know about the art of military logistics and combat support?

That role as wholesale buyer and warehouse operator, with-out a distinct brand or unifying mission, also permeated the old

By James Kitfield

America’s Logistics LeadersThe Defense Logistics Agency transforms itself, bringing a new operational mindset to wartime logistical support

For an Exclusive Interview with the outgoing dla Director,

Lt. Gen. Robert Dail, Turn to . Sailors take a break to eat a Meal, Ready to Eat (MRE.) The Defense Logis-tics Agency's Research and Development Program helps develop new items and packaging for troop rations.

Navy Seahawk helicopters transfer Defense Logistics Agency-procured supplies during an underway replen-ishment.

PHOTO: Petty Officer 2nd Class Seth Peterson

PHOTO: Petty Officer 1st Class Carmichael Yepez

42

Continued on p. 48


Lt. Gen. Robert DailSpeaks with DEFENSE STANDARD

INTERVIEW

By James Kitfield

As director of the Defense Logistics Agency, Army Lt. Gen.

Robert Dail was responsible for providing the Army, Navy,

Air Force, Marine Corps and other federal agencies with

a variety of logistics, acquisition and technical services in

peace and war. These services include logistics informa-

tion, materiel management, procurement, warehousing

and distribution of spare parts, food, clothing, medical

supplies and fuel, reutilization of surplus military materiel

and document automation and production.

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When a leader was needed to help guide the Defense Logistics Agency’s post-911 transformation, the Pentagon reached into its senior operational ranks. Prior to becoming the director of DLA, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Dail served as the deputy commander of U.S. Transportation Command, and he had led military logistics units at every level of command, from platoon to corps. In his own mind, Dail’s mission was clear: Change the fundamental ethos at DLA from that of a wholesale buyer to a direct combat support agency. DEFENSE STANDARD checked in with Dail on the eve of his Nov. 13 retirement for a look back on his two eventful years at the helm. Edited excerpts follow.

Despite supporting the U.S. military to the tune of $35 billion in sales in 2007, DLA is not that

visible in operational theaters. How do you explain ex-actly what the agency does?

I’ll give you a great example. I recently saw an aerial photo of the USS Ronald Reagan (aircraft

carrier) steaming in the Arabian Gulf. Alongside the Rea-gan was a U.S. Navy supply ship conducting underway replenishment. There were helicopters working the sterns

of both ships, transferring repair parts, general supplies, and food. Mid-ships there was a fuel line transferring over 1 million gallons of fuel. DLA was the purchaser and provider of all those supplies, material and fuel. We just partnered with the Navy to make delivery across the last tactical mile to that ship. That gives you an idea of how DLA has changed in the last decade from a wholesale procurement agency to the Defense Department’s single supply-chain manager. We connect the national industrial supplier base to warfighters anywhere in the world.

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INTERVIEWwith Lt. Gen. Dail

Continued from p. 44

Dail tours the H-46 helicopter production line with John Gant, head of production at Fleet Readiness Center East at Cherry Point, N.C. The DLA provides supply, storage and distribution sup-port for maintenance activities at the center.

PHOTO: Debra Bingham

Isn’t that a pretty dramatic change for an agency that for de-cades was viewed primarily as a bulk item purchaser and

warehouse operator?

I’ll be frank, coming from TRANSCOM I had to work hard to convince a lot of long-time DLA employees that my job was

to operationalize this agency, and that the essence of our job was now a combat support mission. It wasn’t good enough any more for DLA to manage wholesale logistics with wholesale metrics and standard contracts. Instead we had to measure our performance by the Navy’s fleet readiness, or by Air Force flying hours, or by Army operational readiness. We had to adopt the warfighters’ metrics, and that required a cultural change at DLA that I worked constantly to communicate and reinforce every day for the past two years. Coming from U.S. Transpor-tation Command I had kind of a unique perspective, and I was assigned here specifically to bridge that cultural gap and mold DLA into a more cohesive, national logistics enterprise.

What drove DLA to undertake such a fundamental transforma-tion?

When I arrived DLA was coming off three major events that to-gether formed the catalyst for change. The first was the Global

War on Terror itself. That demanded transformation not only from DLA, but from the armed services themselves. In Desert Storm (in 1991), for instance, I fought a war at the corps and division level with clear battle lines between the front and rear. The war we’re fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan is a war of (smaller) Brigade Combat Teams and Special Forces units spread throughout entire countries. The national logistics enterprise I spoke of has to direct exterior supply lines into those coun-tries and out to those small, scattered units. So the very nature of the war helped change our concept of support.

What were the other catalysts for change?

When I got here we were just fielding the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Business Systems (EBS) ca-

pability, becoming the first large-scale organization in the Department of Defense to field the advanced software and enterprise capability they represent. Those systems allow commanders to directly manage supply and purchasing globally for the very first time. That’s meant a lot to us.

Finally, the 2005 BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure Commis-sion) directed DLA to break down the wall between wholesale and re-tail logistics, and to make DLA the sole supplier and distributor to our military depots. In a very short time those three catalysts set the table for me to extend DLA activities all the way to forward operating bases around the world, whether they’re in Iraq, Afghanistan or Okinawa.

Along the way the level of DLA’s sales and services skyrocket-ed from $25 billion in fiscal 2003, to $42 billion in fiscal 2008,

yet your workforce remained relatively constant at 22,000 people. How did you manage such a surge in activity without having to increase your workforce?

We leveraged the supplier industrial base and used it to deliver our goods and services. That model actually started back in

the early 1990s thanks to the entrepreneurial spirit of our Philadelphia Supply Center. They contracted with large medical supply vendors, and linked the vendor’s existing distribution and supply systems directly to U.S. military hospitals and clinics. I was a young officer at Fort Bragg at that time, and I remember some of America’s greatest firms suddenly delivering directly to the front door of the 82nd Airborne Division. I thought that was a pretty good deal.

So we have expanded that model. Every galley and cafeteria in the Defense Department today has direct service from commercial ven-dors who are also world-class distributors of food to commercial mar-kets. We recently expanded that model into fuel, where we now have large-scale fuel distributors delivering directly to warfighters. Lever-aging that industrial capability allowed us to deliver increased support without increasing our workforce. And the warfighters love it, because they get the best that commercial industry can offer, at the lowest price, and with more delivery options to mitigate against operational risk. Everyone wins.

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INTERVIEWwith Lt. Gen. Dail

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Aren’t there risks associated with putting so much of the responsibility for supporting war-time forces in the

hands of private contractors?

Frankly, there are some sensitive areas that are central to U.S. warfighting capability that do need to remain

in-house. Retail tactical-level logistics in small tactical fighting forces, or in ships afloat, should be retained in house to the degree possible. There are certain specialty warfighting capabilities as-sociated with nuclear weapons or related materials, for instance, that should also be retained.

At the level of logistics support above the numbered fighting forces and major commands, however, you don’t need someone in uniform performing many of those logistics tasks. We spend an awful lot of money ensuring that every soldier, sailor, air-man or Marine is trained and ready. We don’t need to divert that scarce national treasure to logistics responsibilities that are best performed by professionals in the commercial industry who al-ready operate existing global distribution networks.

Aren’t there war zones that are either too dangerous or too difficult for commercial vendors to operate in?

Well, take Afghanistan as an example. That’s a land-locked country nearly 10,000 miles from the United

States, and it has no ports, railroads or oil refineries to speak of. It has a very limited road network. Yet we’ve been able to support and sustain a Joint Coalition Task Force there through a network of commercial supply chains, freeing the task force commander from having to divert scarce forces to execute the logistics mission.

In anticipating future demand, have you factored in in-dications that the Joint Staff and U.S. Central Command

are considering a shift in forces from Iraq to Afghanistan?

I will tell you that we have already put in place actions that anticipate increased demand (in Afghanistan), just in

case the national leadership decides to change our troop posture. With our DLA people now embedded forward with combatant commanders and joint task forces, we are able to better anticipate those decisions and capture changes in demand ahead of time. And along with our vast commercial supply network, we have already taken steps to respond to those anticipated changes.

Are there other ways that the demands of wartime have made DLA a more responsive supplier?

Yes. For example, when Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates decided last year that the No. 1 focus of the department would

be delivery of MRAP [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected] vehicles to our fighting forces, DLA embedded our professionals in the MRAP Joint Program Office and with the original equipment manufacturer, and linked our cataloging process with all the new parts on the MRAP so that soldiers and Marines could order repair and replacement parts quickly. That rapid response forged a new model of embedding and in-tegrating logistics into Program Management Offices for critical com-bat systems, and we’re going to see more and more of that model in the future.

Another example was the integration of the supply and transport networks to meet increased demand for fire-retardant uniforms. Along with PEO Soldier and TRANSCOM, DLA forged a more responsive partnership to meet that mission requirement, and we’re going to see that happen again and again in the future. Those two examples dem-onstrate how we have changed and adapted to new technologies and an adaptive enemy, and they represent the new azimuth of how we’re going to execute our mission in the future.

We’ve noted that you often talk of military logistics as a “national level enterprise.” What do you mean?

We really do have a national-level enterprise now. For in-stance, I was talking with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs

this morning, and we discussed this enormous supplier base and supply network that are funneling all sorts of commodities to our military forces around the world. Within that enterprise you have DLA, U.S. Transportation Command, the Material Commands for all the armed services, and commercial supply and distribu-tion systems. Increasingly we have integrated those capabilities through advanced information technology, privatization initiatives and modern distribution processes.

Together they’ve created this national level enterprise that I talk about, which can be pulled down to wherever in the world opera-tional forces are executing a mission. The enormous scope of that supply network provides our operators with top performance and tremendous agility, because they have multiple, redundant sources and routes of supply that mitigate the risk that any one route will be closed or denied to them.

So the art of military logistics really has been fundamen-tally transformed?

This is a unique time. I tell people all the time, after the three years I spent at TRANSCOM and two years here at

DLA, I truly believe that what has occurred in military logistics in recent times has been enormously historic. And we will never go back to the old way of doing things. Because we will never want to go back and pickup all that money we left on the table from cost savings and efficiencies. We need to leave it there so the Defense Department can use it to focus on the warfighters.

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The Defense Logistics Agency supplies as much as 3.7 million gallons of fuel each day to forces serving in Iraq.

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culture of DLA. Far-flung supply and distribution centers oper-ated largely as stand-alone enterprises, with relatively little stra-tegic or emotional connection to DLA central.

“In the past DLA field activities kind of viewed themselves as a loosely grouped band of holding companies, and when us guys from headquarters would go out to the field for a visit, we’d hear the comment, ‘Hey, the guys from DLA are here,” said Jeff Curtis, director of Strategic Planning and Enterprise Transforma-tion at DLA. “They weren’t exactly rogue operations, but they largely went their own way. They didn’t pull in parallel with DLA headquarters or other entities. It took awhile to change that cul-ture, but today the big driver of this organization is the concept of ‘one DLA team.’ A lot of the in-ternal finger-pointing of the past has been dispensed with.”

As with the transformation of so many government and mili-tary agencies, the catalyst for that change was the Sept. 11, 2001, ter-rorist attacks and the “global war on terror.” Suddenly, DLA had both a unifying mission and renewed sense of purpose – provide holistic solutions to whatever support prob-lems warfighters confronted. Given the unconventional nature of the counter-insurgency campaigns that developed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and the need to support other global military operations, it soon became clear that those logistics challenges would prove significant and require a new operational mind-set at DLA.

To underscore that point, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Dail, an operator who had previously served as dep-uty commander of U.S. Transpor-tation Command (TRANSCOM), was chosen to lead DLA through its most recent period of change and transformation.

“I’ll be frank, coming from TRANSCOM I had to work hard to convince a lot of long-time DLA employees that my job was to operationalize this agency, and that the essence of our job was now a combat support mission,” Dail told DEFENSE STAN-DARD. The global war on terror, he stressed, had fundamentally changed the role of DLA. “It wasn’t good enough any more for DLA to manage wholesale logistics with wholesale metrics and standard contracts. Instead we had to measure our performance by the Navy’s fleet readiness, or by Air Force flying hours, or by Army operational readiness. We had to adopt the warfighters’ metrics, and that required a cultural change at DLA that I worked constantly to communicate and reinforce every day for the past two years.”

Extending the EnterpriseTo extend the DLA enterprise further into the operational realm,

DLA established logistics liaison officers with major combatant commands to offer support recommendations and anticipate supply demand, beginning in the initial planning phase of operations and continuing all the way through campaign execution and into sus-taining operations. DLA support teams were also embedded with front-line support units in Afghanistan and Iraq to track deliveries and fluctuating requirements for critical supplies. DLA experts were likewise dispatched to work with Program Management Offices to better anticipate the need for replacement parts on the 1,312 weap-ons systems DLA supports.

“We don’t have a huge footprint forward, but our liaison and support teams located in all the major theaters act as DLA’s eyes and ears on operations, and they give us a crucial feedback loop so that the military re-quirements of our customers remain closely aligned with what the industrial base and our vendors are delivering,” said Knott, director of DLA acquisition. “If there was one thing I would want even more of, it’s that face-to-face con-tact that brings us closer to our custom-ers.”

The operational importance of that rapid feedback loop, and of a more dynamic and responsive supply sys-tem, became evident early in Operation Iraqi Freedom. As attacks with roadside bombs and improvised explosive devic-es (IEDs) steadily increased, accounting for the majority of U.S. deaths and seri-ous wounds in Iraq, commanders on the ground realized that nearly all service members in theater needed the fire-re-tardant uniforms previously reserved for only a very limited number of military specialties.

“What began as a small increase in the requirement for fire-retardant uni-forms quickly expanded exponentially,

to the point where nearly all the uniforms we field needed to be fire retardant,” said Knott. Because DLA had long acted as the Defense Department’s single provider of uniforms, she said, it was able to use its contractor relationships to quickly ramp up production of the fire-retardant material, have it cut and sewed into new uniforms, and then rapidly distributed to operational theaters. “That example shows the value of having a single supply-chain manager who can react quickly to changes in the operational environment, rather than the various services having to go to multiple vendors to try and bring about the change themselves.”

The deadly threat posed by IEDs caused DLA to scramble once again in 2007. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates stated publicly that year that the acquisition of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected

Continued from p. 42


Wise said for suppliers such as Ultralifeand EaglePicher, which he described as inthe “second tier” of military powersuppliers compared with giants such as Saft,the challenge is two-fold. First, thecompanies must find a way to be cost-effective since the primary material used inCFx technology is also used for plasmascreen displays and is heavily in demand.Second, they must overcome the military’sresistance to change.“Some technologies are actually

purchased by procurement arms of themilitary, and they have almost a self-fulfilling inertia to keep buying the samethings over and over. If it costs more, theywon’t buy it, even if it is better,” Wise said.“You’re dealing with the culture of themilitary. They don’t want to change.”He says companies such as EaglePicher

or Ultralife have about a one-in-five chancein the next three to five years of persuadingthe military that lithium carbonmonofluoride is the way to go in terms ofportable power technology.Audette is more optimistic.

“By the end of this year, we wouldanticipate we would have a product thatcould be delivered from a productionperspective. We are looking for anopportunity to introduce it to a military thatis interested,” he said. “At this time,militaries are evaluating it in a lab setting,and that is the stepping point before youprovide it to the warfighter. These thingstake time, and it is out on the horizon, butthe very near horizon.”Brundage said CERDEC also is

“hopeful” that the LiCFx technology will bea major advance in military power.“Up until now, everything we’ve done

with carbon monofluoride technology hasshown great promise. That is why we arepursuing it,” he said.The Army traditionally takes the lead on

technologies that involve equipment carriedby soldiers, but CERDEC works closelywith other services and shares informationon developments in the pipeline.“Theother services alreadyare awareofCFx

technologybecausewe’ve been talking about itfor some time now,” Brundage said.

Defense contractors are hard at work on new typesof batteries to power equipment used daily bysoldiers like these, patrolling a newly reconstructedborder checkpoint in Afghanistanʼs NuristanProvince.

Photo: Staff Sgt. Tyffani L. Davis

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Marines in Al Asad, Iraq, put new rotor blades provided by the Defense Logistics Agency on a CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter.

(MRAP) vehicles was the Pentagon’s top priority, and he earmarked $1.1 billion in emergency funds for the program to rush more of the heavily armored vehicles into the field. Because there was no time to conduct field tests and meticulously calculate “meantime be-tween failure” for thousands of MRAP replacement parts, DLA of-ficials worked directly with the MRAP Program Management Office to try and anticipate demand and develop spare part replenishment packages for the MRAP. DLA officials in Iraq then worked closely with units fielding the MRAP to identify unforeseen shortages, es-tablishing an “expedited request” process to hurry critical parts to the field.

Though the shortcuts taken to rapidly push vehicles into the field led to a number of surprises, by June 2008 USA Today reported that U.S. fatalities in Iraq were down almost 90 percent, due in no small part to the MRAPs.

“We’ve always supported the warfighters, but having support teams forward in the field -- with the tools to rapidly reach back to DLA central -- gave us the ability to respond much quicker than in the past, and to have the kind of strategic intelligence that leads to better forecasting of demand,” said Linda Stacy-Nichols, chief of customer and order support for the DLA. “Since we set up a Cus-tomer Interaction Center which is manned 24/7, we have processed over 1,000 expedited requests, for instance, many of them associated with the MRAP.”

To improve response times further, DLA also developed “deploy-able depots” that can be fielded close to the action on short notice. The largest such DLA depot now operates out of Kuwait in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. When Hurricane Ike was bearing down on the Texas Gulf Coast last September, DLA also dispatched a de-ployable depot to Houston to dispense water, tents, cots and other supplies to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“Whether in wartime or during a natural disaster, the deployable depot construct lets us rapidly stand up a forward distribution hub that marries our expertise in demand planning with a traditional warehousing and distribution capability,” said Mike Scott, executive director of material policy, process and assessment. “That eliminates the long shipping lead times we had in the past that are just unac-ceptable today.”

Key EnablersAt its core logistics remains a numbers business, and one figure in

particular reveals the transformation under way at DLA: In the past eight years the level of its activities in support of military operations has skyrocketed from $25 billion in fiscal 2003 to $42 billion in fis-cal 2008. Yet the DLA workforce has remained relatively constant in that timeframe at roughly 22,000 personnel, both military and civil-ian. DLA has managed that nearly doubling of output largely through automation and privatization of the military supply chain, two key enablers that increasingly have come to define the new DLA.

Through an Enterprise Business Systems modernization initia-tive, DLA has applied modern business practices and state-of-the-art information technologies to supply-chain management. Computers using advanced metrics now track each stage of a supply order from requisitioning, processing, warehousing, shipping, consolidation overseas, and finally customer receipt. Transparency and automation are used throughout the process to continually whittle away ineffi-

ciencies and lag times.“Our primary focus is connecting warfighter demand and supply

with the utmost precision, and that requires the ruthless pursuit of time-bounded actions at each stage of the process,” said Scott. “In the past our system would kick out a purchase request, for instance, with a standard lead time to complete the transaction. Not anymore. Today each request carries a time stamp indicating exactly when the warfighter needs the material, and we measure ourselves and our vendors by that standard.”

The DLA supply chain rises to that challenge, he said, through

high-fidelity transparency. “In our new Fusion Center we can put a computer curser on any node in the supply chain, and literally watch the metrics for an order change in front of our eyes, in real-time,” said Scott. “As opposed to the past, when we would typically have a huge number of people involved in each transaction, today the pro-cess is so automated that manual intervention by DLA personnel is necessary at very few points along the way. That’s what we mean by ‘delivering supply chain excellence.’ ”

While DLA officials hone their ability to oversee and manage that process, increasingly they are contracting the entire supply chains from private industry. That model was first tested in the 1990s when DLA’s Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia contracted with large medical supply vendors to use their existing distribution systems to deliver directly to military hospitals and clinics around the world. Today that model largely defines how DLA does business, oversee-ing discreet commercial supply chains that are delivering fuel, food, medical supplies, uniforms and construction material directly to forces in the field.

“We like to say that DLA will go as far forward [with commercial supply chains] as the services want,” said Knott. “Our vendor sup-ply chains go from the oil refinery to the skin of the airplane or ship that needs the fuel. In Iraq we go all the way to a central fuel hub in-country, and from there the services take it to forward operating bases. Our food supply chain goes all the way from where the ven-dor acquires the product to where he delivers it to all the mess halls in Iraq and Afghanistan. So our strategy is to acquire whole supply

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Vice Admiral Alan ThompsonMeet the new DLA director

chains, and allow commercial industry to do what it does best – seamlessly deliver its products to buyers.”

An added advantage to the model is that vendors who already deliver commodities to places such as Iraq and Afghanistan typically know the lay of the land and local customs. Most rely on local workers. On the other hand pricing operations in a war zone into a commercial contract is a challenge unto itself, and one that DLA has made a specialty, establishing a Center for Excellence to teach the nuances of writing and auditing such contracts.

“Relying on prime vendors is an exceptionally good way to manage logistics opera-tions, because they use local people, they are not viewed as strangers or outsiders, and they understand how to operate in these countries and environments,” said Knott. “Pric-ing those operations is much different, however, than pricing a [Continental United States] contract. When you’re delivering to a dining facility in Fort Carson, Colo., for instance, you don’t have to worry about bandits, or insurgents, or losing whole truck-loads or even convoys of materials. You don’t have to worry about strikes during reli-gious holidays you haven’t heard about. You don’t generally have to worry about truck drivers being shot. So making a ‘fair and reasonable’ determination of a fixed price for such services requires a lot of skill from our contract writers.”

Meanwhile back at Fort Belvoir, DLA planners are already anticipating a strategic shift in U.S. military forces from Iraq to Afghanistan in the coming year, and calculat-ing the likely impact on support requirements. The higher elevations, for instance, could raise demand for warmer clothing and certain types of medication. It could affect the “mean time between failure” for parts on weapons systems such as helicopters. The snows of the notorious Afghan winters and more U.S. forces in theater may require DLA to open more supply routes to ensure against potential blockage due to bad weather.

In other words, DLA planners now wrestle with exactly the kinds of operational is-sues that military logisticians have always confronted, but which this one-time generic bulk buyer and “box kicker” rarely had to worry about in the past.

“This is a unique time,” Gen. Dail conceded. “I tell people all the time, after the three years I spent at TRANSCOM and two years here at DLA, I truly believe that what has occurred in military logistics in recent times has been enormously historic. And we will never go back to the old way of doing things. Because we will never want to go back and pickup all that money we left on the table from cost savings and efficiencies. We need to leave it there so the Defense Department can use it to focus on the warfighters.” J

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Thompson, the Defense Logistics Agency’s 16th direc-

tor, is no stranger to the DLA. From September 2001 to

July 2003 he commanded the Defense Supply Center

in Columbus, Ohio, which procures maritime and land

weapon systems parts.

Thompson most recently served as commander of

Naval Supply Systems Command. He also is a former di-

rector of Supply, Ordnance and Logistics Operations for

the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; command-

ed the Fleet and Industrial Supply Center in Norfolk, Va.;

and was the first staff corps officer selected for the Chief of Naval Operations Stra-

tegic Studies Group.

At-sea assignments include service as the supply officer for the USS Chandler

and the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Thompson assumed his new DLA duties in a Nov. 19 ceremony at Fort Belvoir, Va.


Soldiers set up the One System Remote Video Terminal ahead of an exercise at Fort Dix, N.J., part of the largest Future Force C4ISR & Networking Technology Demonstration to date by the U.S. Army Communications - Electronic Research Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) .

C4ISR command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance

By Rich Tuttle

Advances in technology give commanders better eyes, ears and lethality in battle

It is the hallmark of the new American way of war. It is credited with helping put the U.S. on the path to vic-tory in Iraq, and it is being leveraged in Afghanistan.

Its very success, however, is prompting adversaries and po-tential enemies of the U.S. to look for ways to defeat it.

It is C4ISR – command, control, communications, com-puters, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

It is, simply put, a way to understand what is happening and to react so quickly that an enemy can’t respond. Sensors gather information (the “ISR” part) that is then analyzed, organized and presented to commanders for action (the “C4” part).

One current iteration is ODIN, a U.S. Army initiative in Iraq to counter the threat of the roadside bombs known as

improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. It apparently also has been used in other applications, such as helping Special Operations forces.

ODIN – which stands for Observe, Detect, Identify and Neutralize – has received kudos for the way it links sensor-toting manned and unmanned aircraft and different ways of acting on the information they provide. Its ability to per-sistently stare at an area, for example, allows detection of changes like recently disturbed earth, which could indicate an attempt to bury an IED.

ODIN became operational in July 2007. But while the equipment it uses has been described by the Army, it’s a sen-sitive effort and examples of its success are hard to come by. It’s possible, however, that it helped win the Battle of Sadr

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America’s Secret Weapon

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C4ISR

Military officials look over digital maps and imagery at the Central Technical Support Facility.

City earlier this year.The battle in the largely Shiite quarter of Baghdad erupted

in March after insurgents began firing rockets into the Green Zone, where the Iraqi government and U.S. Embassy are lo-cated. After Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki gave the OK to strike, U.S. forces engaged the insurgents.

One aspect of the fight involved unmanned aerial vehicles. By keeping the area under constant surveillance, U.S. forces were able to track movements of militia members and fire on them. It was the first use of UAVs by a brigade-level force, according to a recent CBS News “60 Minutes” interview with Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the commanding general in Iraq, and several of his colonels.

Persistent surveillance was the key, said Col. John Hort. “In

some cases, we would wait four, six, even 10 hours to do the engagement because we didn’t want to kill the guy, we wanted to go after the whole group, the company chain of command if you want to call it that, where they would pick up the rail, drive in their vehicle, go to another location, and do an after action review on what they did.

“Once they got to that site, that’s when we [did] the engage-ment,” he said. “Sometimes that took six, eight, 10 hours to wait. That’s what the Predator [UAV] allowed us to do. It truly preyed on the enemy.”

Two thousand U.S. troops engaged 4,000 insurgents, accord-ing to CBS. It said that 700 of the enemy were killed, with six American deaths.

“It’s my opinion, at the brigade level, that the cease–fire was declared [in April] because [the insurgents] really didn’t have a whole lot left to throw at us,” Hort said.

Such successes have prompted Defense Secretary Robert Gates to reprogram $1.2 billion in Pentagon funds for new sen-sors and aircraft to press the current advantage in Iraq. Con-gress likes the idea, and U.S. forces in Afghanistan are in line for a similar ISR boost.

Tailored Battle NetworkODIN is “part of a broader revolution in war which has to

do with both guided weapons and a battle network designed to search out and find targets,” says Robert Work of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis in Washington.

With such a system, he says, “You can elect to prosecute the targets any way you want. You can put a bullet on them, or you can send out a team to capture people, or you can jam a specific part of the spectrum so that an IED won’t go off. You can do all sorts of stuff.

“What you have seen in Iraq,” he says, “is the assembly of a very tailored battle network in which ISR and guided weapons and Special Operations Forces and general purpose forces all work very closely together to find targets and then [hit] them.”

Among key systems used by Task Force ODIN, – a battal-ion under the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade operating from Camp Speicher near Tikrit, Iraq – are Warrior-A UAVs built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., C-12 aircraft from Hawker Beechcraft, and Shorts–360 planes from Short Brothers plc of Belfast, Ireland.

The Warrior–As of Task Force ODIN’s Alpha Company car-ry electro-optical/infrared or synthetic aperture radar payloads, as well as laser range finder-designators and laser target mark-ers, the Army says.

Some C–12s of TF ODIN’s Bravo Company have been retrofitted as either Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System (MARSS–II) or Aerial Reconnaissance Multi-Sensor (ARMS) platforms, according to the Army. Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Integrated Mission Systems unit says the focus of ARMS is on “find, fix and finish.” C–12s fitted with another package called Highlighter yield change-over-time information on terrain beneath their flight paths.

A modified Shorts–360 airframe, called Constant Hawk, also operated by Bravo Company, “provides a forensic backtrack-ing capability for analysts in their effort to detect the origins of specific anti-Iraqi or anti–coalition attacks,” the Army says. Analysts from TF ODIN’s Aerial Reconnaissance Support Team monitor the flow of information from all the sensors.

Warriors, ARMS and MARSS–II are included in the Penta-gon ISR reprogramming. Also included are video systems that can display continuous motion, and a system that merges sen-sor inputs to automatically keep an area under surveillance for extended periods.

The latter is called Persistent Surveillance and Dissemina-tion System of Systems (PSDS2). Supplied by Raytheon Co., it can tap into a variety of sensors to tell video cameras to check

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© 2007 General Dynamics. All rights reserved. Sectéra and Edge are trademarks of General Dynamics. HAIPE is a trademark of the National Security Agency. All other product and service names are the property of their respective owners. Microsoft product screen shot reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation. General Dynamics reserves the right to make changes in its products and specifications at any time and without notice.

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An engineer installs communications equipment in a PM (Project Manager) C4ISR vehicle as it is prepared for testing.

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out a certain area to help determine if anything of interest is hap-pening there. If so, it alerts commanders to take action.

“It has absolutely in theater saved lives,” says Jack Har-rington, vice president for Command and Control Systems at Raytheon. The specifics are tightly held, but Harrington says that when soldiers go into action, PSDS2 gives them the “ability to see better, know better and have better situation awareness. I think that’s been a huge, huge impact.”

Beyond Iraq, C4ISR was central to the missile shoot–down by a U.S. ship of an errant American spy satellite last February. The effort involved government agencies and labs, as well as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Gen. C. Robert Kehler, commander of Air Force Space Com-mand, says it was a fine lesson “in the power of cross–domain integration” – an emerging thrust that uses C4 to link ISR assets generally associated only with the separate domains of air, land, sea, space and cyberspace.

The shoot–down, Kehler says, pulled “non-traditional sensors together with traditional sensors, allowing a shooter – in this case in the maritime domain – to be in the right place at the right time to take a shot in the right way, so that an intercept could occur, so that following that intercept those same sensors could go back to doing their job on assessing what had happened, and the cycle went on.”

Industry WinnersThe big impetus for current C4ISR programs was 9/11. They

boomed as the Pentagon pulled nearly every lever to quickly move R&D programs to operational use.

New efforts, like ODIN, have popped up since then. Oth-

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ers, like WIN–T (the Army’s Warfighter Information Network Tactical, being developed by General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin) and the NATO Air Ground Surveillance System (un-der development by AGS Industries) will probably continue to gather steam, according to the market research firm Forecast International.

Overall, however, most of the acceleration in C4ISR pro-grams has been completed, Forecast says. “Systems needed by the troops have been introduced and fielded. Technologies that were once 10 years away are now only two or three years away from completion. ...”

Forecast looked at 213 programs and 25 companies, and proj-ects a global C4ISR market of some $64 billion from 2008 through 2017. In 2008, it values the market at $11.6 billion. But it sees a steady decline after that to $3.4 bil-lion in 2017. Over the 10–year period that represents an $8.26 bil-lion, or approximately 71 percent, decrease in market sales.

But some companies will do well. Forecast projects that Raythe-on, General Dynam-ics, AGS Industries, Northrop Grumman and Thales will be the leading five companies in the field.

It figures:• Raytheon will get 13 percent of the 10–year market, or

$8.2 billion. • General Dynamics will come in second with a 6.8 percent

market share, or $4.3 billion.• AGS industries will be in third place with a market share

of 6.6 percent, or $4.2 billion.• Northrop Grumman is projected to be fourth with a 3.7

percent share worth $2.4 billion.• Thales will be fifth with 3.6 percent or $2.3 billion.

Back to the FutureThe guided weapons battle network revolution actually be-

gan in World War II, says CSBA’s Work. The British had the first true version in the Battle of Britain in 1940, but it lacked guided weapons. Soviet planners in the 1980s envisioned such weapons run by machines. Operation Desert Storm in 1991

showed how to add guided weapons, but stressed human con-trol. And this, with Web-based applications and Internet pro-tocols, has turned out to be much more dynamic – and safer – than the old Soviet conception, Work says. For instance, he says, unmanned aircraft today carry missiles with precision guidance, but they can’t be launched until humans give the OK.

It’s not clear where all this will lead, Work says, but he sus-pects the old Soviet idea of machine control will resurface. “I think they were just ahead of their time,” he says. Intelligent machines, advanced robotics and highly reliable automatic

target recognition soft-ware – all under devel-opment – point to a day when machines will detect, analyze and at-tack.

Meanwhile, Work says, adversaries have reacted in three ways to the enormous U.S. advantage in ISR net-working and guided weapons.

“The first is to dis-perse, like in Afghani-stan and Iraq – blend into the population, don’t make yourself a target, don’t mass, and don’t allow the Ameri-can ISR to find you.”

Second, “if you can’t duplicate the scale of

conventional guided weapons, then go after nukes. That’s ex-actly what North Korea and Iran are trying to do. They want to deter the assembly of the ISR network.”

Third is the reaction of countries like China, “which have the money to compete with [the U.S.] in this regime, but they do it asymmetrically.” Instead of buying aircraft carriers to sink U.S. aircraft carriers, for instance, they develop other ways to defeat them.

ODIN has prompted a reaction in a more unlikely place – the Pentagon. In addition to being part of a broader revolution in warfare, it is an aspect of the continuing evolution of the com-mand and control of close air support. The Army has been un-happy with Air Force close air support in Iraq, and has turned to things like ODIN to take up the slack.

The Air Force has scrambled to meet Army demands by stepping up production of UAVs and cranking out more UAV pilots and sensor operators. It also thinks it should operate all UAVs in the theater. But the Army likes ODIN because it’s an

C4ISR

Ernest Chaney, CERDEC’s senior command representative, and Sgt. Joseph Kesner discuss the C4ISR systems carried on board a Humvee at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.

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Army system, and it works.The back–and–forth has been going on for de-

cades. “The Army in a perfect world would like every platoon commander to have his own Predator,” says Ben Lambeth of RAND Corp. “The Air Force view is, ‘Look, only if it’s centrally managed by a single authority for air, a single airspace control authority who is the Air Component Commander, can that as-set offer maximum leverage across the theater in the interests of the Joint Force Commander.’”

He says that if the Army had its way, “you’d have a proliferation of these assets that are basically owned by the individual company commander for his prob-lem, and his problem only. So if there were more pressing needs elsewhere in the theater, that platform would not be available. Under the Air Force com-mand and control arrangement, it would be.”

Lambeth says he tends to agree with the Air Force view because “there’s a more compelling logic to it.”

But disagreements will probably be with us for a while. Gen. Merrill McPeak, who retired as chief of staff of the Air Force in 1994, has said there’s no more emotionally charged issue among the military services than the question of who gets to do what, where and when, ac-

cording to Lambeth. McPeak has been one of President–elect Barack Obama’s senior military advisers.

Stay tuned. J

A warfighter Information Network-Tactical Increment Two test vehicle awaits movement instruction during the WIN-T technology demonstration at Naval Air Engineering Station in Lakehurst, N.J.

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C4ISR

By Rich Tuttle

JTRS is intended to help simplify the job of coordinating close air support missions, among other things. Here, Maj. Rick A. “Rico” Uribe, a forward air controller assigned to Company B, 1st Bat-talion, 23rd Marine Regiment, coordinates close air support as aircraft ordnance hits in the background in Fallujah, Iraq, during a 2004 battle.

JTRS

Program promisestrue interconnectivity

among the services,but can it deliver?

The idea of the Joint Tactical Radio System, or JTRS, is a good one: A family of software-based radios to replace a plethora of legacy radios and

allow members of the U.S. military services to achieve the old dream of easily talking to one another.

The radio system works by using a different “wave-form,” or signal-sending system, for each domain -- land, sea and air. An Army soldier in a foxhole could talk to a Navy pilot overhead by selecting the “air” waveform; a sailor off the beach could talk to the soldier by choosing the “land” waveform; an Air Force pilot could talk to the sailor by selecting the “sea” waveform, and so on.

The plan has been to use JTRS to “link the power of the Global Information Grid (GIG) to the warfighter in apply-ing fire effects and achieving overall battlefield superiority,” says the JTRS Joint Program Executive Office.

The JTRS network would “improve information shar-ing, collaboration and situational awareness” and thus allow “more rapid and effective decision making and execution on the battlefield,” according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). It would, among other things, work with leg-acy radios, which would ultimately be phased out, the GAO says in an August report. The radio system upgrade was con-sidered so basic that the very design of some new weapon systems, including the Army’s Future Combat Systems, de-pended on it.

Jump StartThe stakes were high but the technology seemed to be in

hand when the program was launched in 1997. But something

happened on the way to meeting the requirement -- the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

One result was that troops in Afghanistan and Iraq needed radios right away. In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, they used whatever they could get, including legacy radios and cell phones. JTRS development took a back seat.

And development was hampered by unforeseen difficul-ties. The National Security Agency, for example, charged with protecting U.S. government information systems among other things, worried that JTRS’s very heart, its software, might be vulnerable. What if an enemy picked up a JTRS on the battle-field and listened in? What if a hacker broke the code? How would we know?

But the Pentagon wanted to keep JTRS alive until such problems could be solved. With two wars raging and no time to waste, it asked industry to come up with an interim solution. It said, “What do you guys have off-the-shelf” that can run the

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652008 DEFENSE STANDARD


Boeing is the prime contractor for the Army’s Ground Mobile Radios, known as JTRS GMR, a software-programmable radio system that provides mobile military users with secure, multichannel voice, data, imagery and video communications.

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JTRS operating system, called SCA for Software Communica-tions Architecture, says Greg Giaquinto of Forecast International, a market research firm.

SCA, he says, is similar to Windows Vista or XP. If a legacy radio can run SCA, it can run the JTRS waveforms. And when JTRS radios eventually come on line, the old modified radios will be able to talk to them.

The JTRS-light souped-up legacy models aren’t perfect. In fact, no current radios meet all the requirements for SCA certifica-tion.

Two handheld radios do meet some of the basic criteria. They are acceptable because they are less vulnerable than full JTRS radios, whose very sophistication increases their chance of be-ing compromised, Giaquinto says. They’re also less capable, but they’re a welcome step in the right direction, and are being bought in large numbers.

Soaring CostsBut with JTRS development under way at the same time, the

Pentagon must balance “the investment in both current and future radios -- a dynamic proposition given that needs change and future capabilities do not necessarily proceed predictably,” GAO says.

The dollar figures speak for themselves. When JTRS development began in 2002, the Pen-tagon planned to spend about $3 billion on the program over fiscal years 2003-2007 -- $1 billion for development and test-ing and $2 billion to begin procurement. Spending on legacy radios was ex-pected to be relatively low, and then dry up as JTRS came online. The Army and Marines wanted to spend about $235 million be-tween fiscal 2003 and 2007 on older radios.

But instead of $3.2 billion for JTRS and Army and Marine leg-acy radios, the actual number was about $8.3 billion -- $5.7 billion for legacy radios and $2.5 billion for JTRS development.

The amount spent on development and production of tactical radios over the last five years is definitely an attention-getter -- $12 billion. This, says GAO, is comparable to spending in that period on Future Combat Systems ($10.4 billion) and production of Virginia-class submarines ($10.8 billion).

In terms of individual radios, a legacy type runs about $20,000. A JTRS, while more capable, may cost 10 times as much.

A JTRS JPEO business model has demonstrated what the of-fice calls “significant cost savings.” The model stresses “software reuse and upgrades, and fosters competition in production.”

But GAO says the cost of integrating JTRS with some exist-ing weapon systems may also be high, meaning it might not be possible to put more of them in each combat unit, as has been planned.

And because the updated legacy radios should last for 10 or 15 years, the Pentagon may have to strike a balance between ca-pability and cost if it wants to introduce JTRS without an early phase-out of the older radios, GAO says. It might have to decide whether the priority is replacing legacy radios, or putting JTRS into network-dependent systems like FCS.

Weapons for TodayThe calculations may have been complicated by Defense Sec-

retary Robert Gates’ recent shake-up of the Air Force -- he fired the secretary and the chief of staff for, in his view, not putting enough emphasis on weapons to win today’s battles. The Army got the

message and began early spin-outs of some of FCS components, including two from JTRS.

The Pentagon restruc-tured JTRS in 2005, a move that deferred some capabilities but allowed more time for develop-ment. But it also delayed initial fielding of one JTRS component, the Ground Mobile Radio, by five years to 2011. This prompted some us-ers who were planning on buying GMR to purchase legacy radios instead, only increasing the over-all demand for tactical

radios.In 2007, the JTRS office established an incremental approach.

The number of waveforms was cut from 32 to 11 under “Incre-ment 1,” allowing more focused development. Following this, upgrades will be developed for the “next wave” of JTRS capabili-ties. One task will be to identify “targeted software upgrades to each of [the] current hardware sets.” The goal is to “ ‘thicken’ the tactical network.”

JTRS program managers face several challenges, the GAO says: completing development, living with tight budgets, and com-ing up with a fielding strategy for tactical radios. It says JTRS is “making progress,” but “must still overcome technology hurdles, size and power constraints, and security architecture issues.”


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A number of components and contractors are part of the Joint Tactical Radio System. Here’s a summary:

Ground Mobile RadioPrime contractor: Boeing. The company marked availability of engineering development model

(EDM) systems on Sept. 17 and says the final phase of EDM integration is under way.

“Providing the new [EDMs] on schedule took a committed effort by Boeing and its partners Rockwell Collins, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman,” says Ralph Moslener, Boeing JTRS GMR program manager.

A decision on whether to enter full-rate production is slated for the summer of 2010. Initial operational capability (IOC) is planned for 2011.

Airborne and Maritime Fixed Site Prime contractor: Lockheed Martin. AMF will be integrated into air, maritime and fixed site plat-

forms for the Air Force, Navy and Army aviation. A production decision in slated for 2011, and IOC would occur in 2014.

Multifunctional Information Distribu-tion System (MIDS) JTRS

Prime contractors: ViaSat and Data Link Solutions. A main goal is to increase the ability to work with Link 16, which al-

lows ships and aircraft to exchange information.The final qualification portion of the MIDS JTRS System Development

and Demonstration phase is under way. Testing to assure compliance with NSA security rules started in July 2008 and should wind up early next year. A production decision is planned for the spring of 2009.

Handheld, Manpack, Small Form Fit (HMS)

Prime contractor: General Dynamics C4 Systems.

This set, intended to give soldiers video, voice and data, will work with equipment now used by civilian and military land, air and maritime forces. It will also support three Army Future Combat Systems elements -- the Intel-ligent Munitions System of smart mines, the Unattended Ground Sensor system, and the Non-Line of Sight Launch System.

A production decision for one of three HMS pre-engineering development models, Small Form Fit C(V1), is slated for 2009.

Consolidated Interim Single-Channel Handheld Radios (CISCHR)

Contractors: Thales and Harris.Two current handheld radios -- Thales’ PRC-148 and Harris’ PRC-

152 – have been modified to operate with other radios. “NSA certified and considered ‘JTRS approved,’ [and] they are presently deployed in ... Iraq and Afghanistan,” the JTRS office says.

General Dynamics Manpack

Thales Communications AN/PRC-148 JEM

Network Enterprise DomainNED’s purpose is to develop waveforms for legacy and transformational systems as well as

network management and software “to fully enable JTRS’ mobile, ad hoc networking capability.” This effort, according to the JTRS office, “is the heart of the interoperable networking capability of JTRS.”

NED, says Greg Giaquinto of market research firm Forecast International, is “not the sexy part, it’s the brains, the deal breaker -- getting the software to actually work, getting the software to be safe so you can’t hack into it. That’s where they’re going to be spending a good majority of their money, on software development.”

JTRS

Who’s Who and What’s What in JTRS

2008 DEFENSE STANDARD

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PA-DefStand-SMU.indd 1 11/20/08 4:08:58 PM


The Air Force will increase spending for procurement of unmanned aerial systems

(UAS) from $1.224 billion in fiscal 2008 to $1.383 billion in fiscal 2009, a new Frost & Sullivan market study forecasts.

The projected FY 2009 procure-ment total includes $700.6 million for the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk, $445.7 million for the General Atom-ics MQ-1 Predator, $215.7 million for the General Atom-ics MQ-9 Reaper and $20.5 million for the Battlefield Air Target-ing Micro Air Vehicle (BATMAV) program, which uses the Aero-Vironment WASP III micro air vehicle.

Over the same pe-riod, the study esti-mates that Air Force UAS Operations and Maintenance (O&M) spending will rise from $102 million to $105.2 million and UAS Re-search, Development, Test and Evalua-tion (RDT&E) spending will go up from $336.7 million to $356.5 million.

Total Air Force UAS spending, includ-ing procurement, O&M, and RDT&E, will rise from $1.663 billion in fiscal 2008 to $1.844 billion in fiscal 2009, then gradually decline to $1.356 billion in fiscal 2016, the study estimates.

The increases are due to the virtually insatiable demand from combat com-manders and strong prodding from De-fense Secretary Robert Gates, who has urged the services, particularly the Air Force, to accelerate fielding of unmanned

aerial systems to Iraq and Afghanistan.“My concern is that our services are

still not moving aggressively in war-time to provide resources needed now on the battlefield,” Gates said April 21 at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala. “I’ve been wrestling

for months to get more intelligence, sur-veillance, and reconnaissance assets into the theater. Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth. While we’ve doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough.”

Lindsay Voss, an industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan and author of the study, “U.S. Unmanned Systems Mar-ket,” said in an interview that Air Force spending on UAS procurement has been increasing for about five years.

“Basically, there was a huge upward trend for procurement starting in about 2003 and it’s kind of gone up that way just because of procurement of the MQ-1 [Predator] … and now kind of

an upswing in the MQ-9 Reaper,” Voss said. “And then also the Global Hawk. … Those three aircraft are what you’re mainly seeing procured by the Air Force.”

The upward trend in UAS spend-ing will continue in the near term, Voss

said, because the Air Force has a short-age of these systems. “So they’re trying to pick it up and get production going and up those numbers as much as they can, because the need is there. Now the ques-tion is whether or not the need is going to continue at the rate it has been.”

After peaking at $1.383 billion in fis-cal 2009, the study forecasts that Air

Force spending on procurement of UAS

will gradually decline to $1.098 billion in fiscal 2016.

“There’s going to be a surge in the procurement for a couple more years, and then more of a maintenance trend: Replacing what needs to be replaced and meeting the needs that are going to be out there,” Voss said.

In replacing UAS, the service likely will seek greater capability, she said. The Predator B is one example. “The Air Force … is looking for a replacement for the Predator B,” she said, adding that the contenders include the highly classi-fied General Atomics Predator C, which will offer new capabilities, and the BAE Systems Mantis advanced technology demonstrator.

’09 AIR FORCE Spotlight

The Air Force was seeking $700.6 million in fiscal 2009 for procurement of Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk, part of a total unmannned aerial systems request of $1.38 billion.

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Army Staff Sgt. Hank Moreno, a sniper with 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry Regi-ment, pulls security duty in front of a Stryker combat vehicle during an infil-tration into Rawad, Iraq. The Army plans to buy another 900 Strykers in 2009 and beyond.

Modular ForceFaster, More Compact, Still Lethal

By Tom Breen

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Now that the U.S. Army’s $141 billion budget request for 2009 has won the ap-

proval of the president and Congress, the service is charging toward its goal of making combat units leaner and faster as demands abroad con-tinue without appar-ent letup. The Army calls its approach modularity.

The ultimate goal for 2011 and beyond: Trim brigade combat teams to 3,000 or less -- from 3,400 to 4,000 now -- to make them more self-sufficient and able to assemble quickly when conflict calls. The require-ment grows out of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To meet its modular-force goals, the Army, in a major pro-curement move monitored closely by the defense industry, has set aside $9.3 billion of its $141 billion budget. Modu-lar equipment categories include “Move, Shoot, Communicate, Intelligence-Sur-veillance, Force Protection and Strike.”

The $9.3 billion will be used across a broad range of programs, and will call upon the services of thousands of Army contractors, according Army budget of-ficials. Some of the $9.3 billion appears to have been targeted toward an Army plan to build hundreds of armed recon-naissance helicopters with Bell Heli-copter, but the Army and the Pentagon scrapped the program in October. Now,

money from the Bell program likely may be used for other modular-support categories, especially for those to up-grade and re-equip National Guard and Reserve units.

Among the programs falling under the $9.3 billion umbrella, according to Army spokesman Dave Foster, are the Stryker vehicles and their procure-ment; modifications to M1 Abrams tanks; Abrams tank upgrades; sustain-ment and modifications for Bradley Fighting Vehicles; M4 carbine weap-ons; M119 Howitzers, Light Weight (155MM, Towed); medium tactical ve-hicles; utility trucks; and night-vision thermal weapon sights.

General Dynamics, a major Army contractor, will lead the way in many of the programs.

The Stryker Light Armored Vehicle is at the heart Army’s modularization

plans. So far, the Army has received 2,500 of the vehicles, with plans to buy another 900 in this budget and subsequent ones, said Peter Keating, a spokesman for General Dynamics Land

Systems, the main con-tractor for the program.

The Stryker is light and mobile, but has sufficient firepower to counter en-emy assaults. The Stryker is named in honor of Army Spec. 4 Robert Stryker, who received the Medal of Honor in the Viet-nam War, and Pfc. Stuart Stryker, who received the Medal in World War II. The men are not related.

As the Army’s modu-larity efforts increase, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ratcheted up

the pressure on the Army and the other services to upgrade equipment for

the entire force. Special priority is be-ing placed on upgrades for Army Na-tional Guard and Reserve units, which continue to operate with second-rate equipment including body armor, ac-cording to several sources familiar with the Army’s thinking.

Further, once Barack Obama moves into the White House, the Pentagon likely will step up efforts in Afghani-stan, meaning the entire force needs to be better equipped. Obama indicated repeatedly throughout the election campaign that he would increase the troop commitment to Afghanistan. If that happens, much of the burden like-ly will fall upon the Army.

’09 ARMY Spotlight


The Marine Corps’ commu-nications and electronics budget for the coming year

– just over $500 million -- is a mere shadow of the roughly $2 billion of just two years ago. But whatever other limitations the Corps faces at a time of shrinking budgets, it is committed to maintain-ing and improving criti-cal communications for its troops. From tactical radios for small unit mis-sions to mobile satellite terminals deployed with a Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters, the Corps is pumping mil-lions next year into sys-tems intended to keep the information flowing and Marines communi-cating.

The Corps will spend about $18 million in fis-cal 2009 for additional purchases of lightweight tactical radios that can be mounted on vehicles or carried by hand, says Capt. Carl Redding, a Corps spokesman at the Pentagon. The radio substantially enhances command and control at the small-unit level.

Ben Rand, a spokesman for Harris Corp., the Rochester, N.Y., manufac-turer of the system, said the Marine acquisitions include the company’s Falcon III AN/VRC-110 vehicle radio system, along with handheld Falcon III AN/PRC-152C units – two to a vehicle -- and a kit for linking the handheld ra-dio to the vehicle system.

“The -152 we developed on our

own, and it’s designed against the Joint Tactical Radio System requirements,” Rand said. “It’s been widely deployed (and) ... it has access to a range of tech-nologies, including satellite, UHF and more. It’s multiband, multimission in one package, and it’s software defined,

so it is upgradeable as technologies change.”

The Corps also intends to upgrade its satellite communications capabili-ties by spending $7 million on improve-ments to the Phoenix Tactical Satellite Terminal, a mobile, multiband, super-high-frequency communications trans-mitter. The system can operate over both commercial and military super-high-frequency satellites. The upgrade will give the Phoenix a new Ka band capability, which is less costly for the Corps than leasing commercial band-width, while also giving more flexibil-

ity to commanders in the field, Redding said.

Meanwhile, the Corps is continu-ing to pump millions into a system for deployed Marines to establish secure voice, data and video communications among commanders, including in joint

and coalition environ-ments, Redding said.

Toward that goal, the Corps expects to spend $12.8 million next year on the Tac-tical Data Network Data Distribution System-Modular, or TDN DDS-M. That’s just a portion of a $375 million contract the Corps awarded General Dynamics in March, to acquire the system over time.

The system con-nects Marines to essen-tial tactical networks wherever they deploy, Scott Butler, the com-

pany’s C4 Systems vice president of computing technologies, said in March when the contract was awarded. The modular nature of the system has Ma-rines excited because it gives them a more tactically flexible asset.

“By acquiring a more modular asset base, tactical units will no longer be re-quired to load out their whole network structure, but can rather deploy with networking modules tailored to the unit and mission, with the option to expand capability modularly when forward units are absorbed by larger headquar-ters,” Redding said.

Keeping ContactCorps Upgrades Tactical Communications

By Bryant Jordan

A Marine assigned to Combined Anti-Armor Team, Task Force 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, uses a Harris Falcon III AN/PRC-152(C) handheld radio to keep in contact during an August 2008 mission in Afghanistan. The Corps is pumping about $18 million in fiscal 2009 into com-munications upgrades.

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’09 MARINE CORPS Spotlight


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PHOTO: Ricky Thompson, Electric Boat

The cost of building each Virginia-class attack submarine has fallen about 20 percent over 10 years.

Attack SubsN avy Wants to Double Production Rate

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Riding high in the wake of finan-cial and operational successes, the Navy’s Virginia-class attack

submarine program is enjoying acclaim the service has rarely enjoyed in the acquisition of the service’s prized undersea boats.

The service is under the gun, too, facing a major shortfall in its submarine force if it fails to buy the boats fast enough.

The Virginia is the latest class of the Navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarines – the service’s most versatile marine asset, used for patrols, spy missions and pro-tection. It started funding four Virginia-class subs in 1998 to replace the Cold War-era Los Angeles-class subs.

The service asked for $2.1 bil-lion in fiscal 2009 to finish up the 11th Virginia-class boat; the Navy already has spent about $756 mil-lion for the sub.

The Navy’s 2009 request also included $719.8 million to procure certain key components for the 11th sub and seven more the Navy bought under multiyear contracts running through fiscal 2013.

What the Navy hoped is that in approv-ing the money Congress would also sanc-tion full-rate production of two of the “ship submersible nuclear,” or SSN, boats per year.

“The operational risks of allowing the SSN force to drop below 48 are unaccept-able,” Ronald O’Rourke, a Navy expert for the Congressional Research Service, report-ed to lawmakers earlier this year.

Unless sub production nearly doubles to two per year by early next decade, the Navy’s attack sub fleet would likely drop to 41.

The odds that lawmakers would approve the production-rate increase improve as the submarine builders meet cost-cutting goals

and operational milestones.Sub costs, excluding some of the re-

search and development, are dropping to about $2 billion per boat, about a fifth lower than earlier in the decade.

The builders reengineered sub parts, saving manpower and materials, said Dan Goure, Navy expert for the Lexington Insti-tute, a noted think tank just outside Wash-ington, D.C. “This is an example of how

Navy programs should be done,” he said.Besides the $2.7 billion the Navy bud-

geted in fiscal 2007 for Virginia-class sub-marines, the service also requested $3.4 bil-lion in fiscal 2008 and about $3.5 billion in fiscal 2009.

The service expects a lot for its money, counting on the nuclear-powered Virginia-class to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles, gather intelligence, insert special operations forces and conduct an array of missions no one can talk about – all undetected.

“Virginia-class submarines provide a brand-new flexible, stealthy platform for employment of the Tomahawk Weapon System,” Capt. Rick McQueen, program manager for Naval Air Systems Com-mand’s (NAVAIR) Tomahawk Program Of-fice, said in September shortly after the USS Virginia – SSN 774 – completed multiple

Tomahawk tests in the Gulf of Mexico.The tests were a first for the sub class. “Completing the Tomahawk flight tests

brings us a significant step closer to the program’s full-rate production decision in 2009,” said David Johnson, recently selected for rear admiral and Virginia-class program manager. “The Virginia class was conceived and designed as a multipurpose warship, and these flight tests are another indication of the

significant capabilities a Virginia submarine brings to the fight.”

In May 2008 the program com-pleted two other milestones – the commissioning of the Virginia- class USS North Carolina and the final hull welds of the Virginia-class submarine New Mexico – when the hull sections are joined to form a single unit. It was the last major milestone before the ship’s christening.

“We’re on track to deliver the ship eight months ahead of sched-ule,” said Becky Stewart, vice

president of submarine programs for Northrop Grumman Newport News. The boat is set to be delivered in 2009.

In August, General Dynamics’ Electric boat delivered the Virginia-class sub New Hampshire eight months ahead of schedule.

“We reduced the time between when the ship enters the water and when it’s delivered from 14 months on the first ship to less than six months,” said John Casey, president of the company’s Groton Yard, where the ships are built.

Few thought the Virginia-class program would see such success. It forced two long-term competitors – Northrop Grumman and Electric Boat – to form a true partnership and build each sub simultaneously, with the two yards focusing on different boat parts.

Goure said the partnership has worked: “They have been competitive and it’s helped the program.”

’09 NAVY Spotlight

Citizen WarriorsAnd Their Bosses

EmployerSupport

Goes Aboveand Beyond

By Tom Philpott

Spc. Kesha Stocks (center left) hugs Master Sgt. Cynthia Carlucci during a welcome home ceremony at the National Guard Armory in Lawrenceville, N.J. Both are members of the New Jersey National Guard’s 50th Personnel Services Battalion.

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Roger Orton, a sergeant first class in the Utah Army National Guard, got a shock after he told his bosses at Robinson Transport, a coal-

hauling company in Salina, Utah, that his unit would be called up for duty in Iraq.

Orton and two other employees serve in Battery A, 222 Field Artillery and expected to be gone at least a year. Kim Robinson, the company president, and his sis-ter, Lorraine Smith, told Orton they would support him any way they could. As a long-time employee, Orton wasn’t surprised by the owners’ expression of support.

But then the Robinsons discussed the matter privately and decided their company could do more for warriors going to fight for their country: They would pay their spouses $1,000 a month each during the deployment.


Soldiers from the Pennsylvania Army National Guard inspect the remains of a car they stopped after observing three suspected insurgents at-tempting to plant improvised explosive devices on the side of the road in Bayji, Iraq.

“I told them I didn’t need the $1,000,” Orton recalled. “As an E-7 with 34 years in the Guard I was making a pretty good wage. They said, ‘Don’t worry about it. This is what we’re doing for your wife to ease any pain, any pressure, so she doesn’t have to worry while you’re gone.’ ”

The company of 130 employees so far has paid the extra cash to seven Guardsmen since 2005, including a young truck driver who had

been on the payroll only three months before he deployed.“That’s $12,000 a year to each of us, plus they would not drop our

health insurance or life insurance, so we were double insured,” Orton said.

Orton did not end up deploying to Iraq, though he later shipped out to Afghanistan. But while the rest of his battery was in Ramadi, Iraq, Orton was mobilized to take care of their families from unit headquar-ters in Richfield, Utah.

While there, Orton mentioned to Robinson that those soldiers in Iraq lacked an Internet system to keep in touch with families. A short time later Kim gave him a check for $5,000 to buy broadband ser-vice.

Orton was stunned. “I said, ‘Kim, are you sure?’ He said, ‘That’s a small price we pay for freedom.’ He has said that to me a million times.”

Said Robinson: “I thought: They’re over there fighting for our free-doms, worrying about their lives. I thought about their families, their children and a lot of stuff they’re missing out on. ... It’s tough.”

‘Tremendous Patriotism’Robinson Transport was one of 15 employers nationwide to be rec-

ognized last September with a 2008 Freedom Award, the top honor from the National Committee of Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR). But ESGR’s executive director, J. Gordon Sumner, said the depth of support being shown by employers large and small reflects a “tremendous aura of patriotism” that has remained strong

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Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve aircraft and crews join their active-duty counterparts in the skies over Iraq. Here, Col. Charles “Spider” Dorsey taxis alongside a New York Air National Guard F-16 Fighting Falcon prior to takeoff from Joint Base Balad, Iraq.

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since 9/11.Some companies as large as Union Pacific of Omaha and Domin-

ion Resources Inc., of Richmond, Va., offer a pay differential and continue benefits to employees while they are mobilized. Others have been praised for supporting returning wounded troops, for sending “care packages” and phone cards to deployed troops, or for includ-ing families of deployed members in company gatherings including picnics and parties.

Evidence of the tightening strain on employers from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “really hasn’t bubbled up yet,” said Sumner, “remarkable” given how heavily the nation has relied on Guard and Reserve forces since 9/11. As of August 2008, almost 500,000 reserve component members had deployed to combat zones, supplying 27 percent of battle forces over the last seven years. Additional Reserve and Guard members have been mobilized for homeland disasters such as hurricanes, pushing the total deployed past 700,000.

Multiple deployments of key personnel might tempt some employ-ers to extract a toll from military volunteers. But a powerful and com-prehensive law, the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemploy-ment Rights Act (USERRA), protects Reserve and Guard members.

Disputes still arise daily between employers and employees, usual-ly because one doesn’t understand what USERRA requires. It forbids employers from discriminating or taking any adverse action against a current or prospective employee due to military service, status or obligations. Employers must reinstate a Guard or Reserve member returning from active duty to the same job they would have if they had been continuously employed, or to a job of equal seniority and pay.

Employees have obligations under the law as well. They must meet five criteria to protect their reemployment rights, including notifying

employers before they leave for active duty. They must seek rein-statement in a timely manner, based on length of deployment. For example, those deployed 181 days or longer have 90 days from discharge to let employers know they want their jobs back.

The ESGR is a De-partment of Defense entity to educate em-ployers and reservists

about USERRA and to encourage compliance by publicly recogniz-ing employers who exceed their legal responsibilities in supporting their employees. ESGR also tries to resolve disputes before formal complaints are filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, which en-forces USERRA.

Measures of SupportOne sign that employer support remains strong, said Sumner, is

that reserve components are meeting or exceeding recruiting and re-tention goals.

“If families didn’t feel they were supported [by] employers, it would be real easy for them to say, ‘Hey look, you can’t do this any-more. We can’t live like this.’ But they are not” saying that, said Sum-ner.

Another yardstick is the number of employers being nominated by Reserve or Guard members for special ESGR recognition. Last year the organization received 1,100 nominations for the Freedom Award,

he said. “This year we had 2,200 nominations -- a 97 percent increase of people talking about how great their employers are doing.”

Part of that is the fruit of an ESGR outreach effort that uses more than 4,500 volunteers across the country to interview businesses, ex-plain USERRA and ask them to sign a “Statement of Support” pub-licly declaring they back Guard and Reserve employees. In fiscal 2007, nearly 12,000 employers signed the statement. In 2008, ESGR collected 30,000 signatures, four times the annual average collected before 9/11.

“These corporations are making it a Kodak moment where they use this to show publicly their [support]. They are just proud to do it, and we make a big deal out about it,” said Sumner.

Reserve and Guard members, or their employers, can call ESGR’s 24-hour support center at 800-336-4590 to make a complaint or to get advice. In fiscal 2004, the center handled 6,000 complaint cases. By 2007, the number had fallen to 2,600, and stayed at that level in fiscal 2008.

Most cases, Sumner said, are resolved in a day with a phone call or an e-mail. Usually, it’s “an education issue where one side or the other just didn’t understand requirements of the law,” he said.

Most employer complaints involve employees who wait until the last minute to tell bosses they’re leaving. That doesn’t violate the law but it’s not fair to employers “who have to sacrifice to allow you to serve,” Sumner said.

A spokesman for the Labor Department, which also has stepped up

“They take care of my family when I’m gone. He does a lot of things [that are] out of reach

for me.”

— Sgt. Micharl Echiverri on appreciating his

employer’s continued support of him and his

family while he is overseas


its own outreach program to educate employers on USERRA, said it opens on average about 1,350 investigations a year for alleged viola-tions. That is up about 400 cases compared to year 2000, but it’s only half the number of investigations opened during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Only a third of those investigations will uncover evidence to sup-port a USERRA violation. “Most employers want to do the right thing. … A lot of these disputes are due to a lack of understanding,” said the Labor official.

More than 127,000 Reserve and Guard members have gone to war more than once since 2001, present-ing their employers with a special burden. Sgt. Michael Echiverri, 50, with 4th Battalion, 87th Field Artillery Regiment of the Hawaii National Guard, left for Kuwait in late October on his third wartime tour. There to see him off from Fort Hood, Texas, was his employer Bob Barrett, president of Coastal Windows of Waipahu, Hawaii. Echiverri has worked for Barrett for 10 years as a delivery driver, taking vinyl frame windows and doors to job sites.

“We have to replace him with two people, he’s so self-sufficient and good with customers,” Barrett said. “We really miss him when he’s gone.”

Echiverri nominated Coastal Windows for a Freedom Award be-cause during his deployments Bar-rett stayed in touch with Echiverri and his family. Coastal also will close any pay gap if military pay falls below company wages.

Echiverri said he nominated Coastal for the award because of how Barrett has stuck by him through years of deployments. “They take care of my family when I’m gone. He does a lot of things [that are] out of reach for me,” said Echiverri.

“The biggest thing is love and support,” said Barrett. “It’s kind of like how you treat a family member.”

Meeting ChallengesLt. Gen. Clyde A. Vaughn, director of the Army National Guard,

said employer support for his 333,000 soldiers has improved “fairly dramatically” in recent years as the Guard rebalanced its force to make deployments shorter and more predictable.

“We stabilized the demand … and we don’t have as many people deployed,” Vaughn said, noting that 50,000 Army Guard personnel currently are deployed, about half the number mobilized in 2005.

“The other thing that had a huge impact is the secretary of defense [Robert Gates] made the 12-month mobilization policy” so fewer soldiers, families and employers have their lives interrupted for 18 months, which Vaughn called extreme. “If we had continued like we were in 2005, we would have had really significant problems with our force.”

Vaughn said he and Lt. Gen. Jack C. Stultz, chief of the Army Re-serve, “work employers pretty hard” to support citizen soldiers. The feedback is positive, particularly from large corporations, Vaughn

said.“The big employers especially

say, ‘We want to give your guys first priority because we know you’re going to give us a drug-free, disciplined individual.’ The big guys are having so much trouble hiring those kinds of peo-ple today that they are willing to support periodic deployments.”

It’s been more challenging for small employers and self-em-ployed Guardsmen and reserv-ists, Vaughn conceded. And by their nature, he said, Guard and Reserve members can leave big-ger holes in communities when away because a disproportionate number are volunteer firefight-ers, emergency medical techni-cians, highway patrol officers and coaches, he said.

Sumner said large businesses are financially more able to sup-port their employees during de-ployment. But when key employ-ees are absent, any size company can feel it.

“Take a large company that makes left-handed weegee nuts. A production manager has re-sponsibility for 10 to 20 people to make X number of nuts during a

shift. When two to four members are called up, that individual has lost 20 percent or more production capability. So you have to look at it as a small business within a large business.”

Vaughn seemed a little surprised himself that there hasn’t been a spike of USERRA complaints given that, before 9/11, nobody was ready for “a long-term conflict that took soldiers away on a rotational basis.”

“We’ve all been catching up real, real fast over the last seven years,” Vaughn added. He said he is proud of how the nation -- service personnel, communities and employers – has responded.

But Samuel F. Wright, a retired Navy captain, attorney and expert on USERRA, said he is skeptical of claims that today’s employers are more supportive of Reserve and Guard employees.

National Guardsmen from the 50th Personnel Services Battalion, 250th Personnel Services Detachment and the Afghan National Army Embedded Training Team (Task Force Phoenix) march through Lawrenceville, N.J., during a welcome home ceremony.

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Wright conceded he has no data to support his skepticism except the individual cases filed in federal court for USERRA violations. They suggest employers are trying various ways to get around the law, he said. Some are converting reservists’ jobs to contractor status so they are not required to rehire or to maintain benefits during deployment. Other employers have tried to fire Guard or Reserve members before they deploy or to use company restructur-ing schemes as an excuse to avoid rehiring returning employees.

Yet Wright conceded his perspective is based on individual lawsuits, not the kind of data the Labor Department or ESGR collect that might detect a trend but, so far, have not.

“Maybe I’m too negative but if the em-ployer did all that the law required, or even more,” Wright said, “then there should be no case.”

Congress this year strengthened the USERRA in a couple of ways by passing the Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act (PL 110-245). One provision allows small business employers a tax credit of up to 20 percent on wage differentials paid to employees called to active duty. For example, if the military pays a member $1,000 a month less than his civilian wages, an employer who closes that monthly gap can claim a tax credit of $200 a month. It applies only to employers with fewer than 50 workers and covers pay differentials of up to $20,000 a

year. Another change requires civilian employers and pension plans

to extend some USERRA benefits to families of Reserve and Guard members killed in service or so seriously disabled they cannot return to work, even with reasonable employer accommodations for their dis-abilities. The changes apply to deaths or disabilities on or after Jan. 1,

2007. Reserve and Guard members, and em-

ployers, should contact ESGR first with any problem, Sumner said. ESGR can’t get involved after a complaint goes to the La-bor Department of Labor or to an attorney.

At Robinson Transport, the company’s offer of an extra $1,000 a month while deployed has encouraged several employ-ees to try to join the Utah Guard. “For 27 years, they’ve done nothing but treat me with respect,” said Roger Orton, adding he

is proud of his company.For his part, Kim Robinson said he’s never been as moved as when

a general at a Sept. 12 Washington, D.C., reception for Freedom Award winners shook his hand and he came away holding a medallion in the shape of a dog tag.

It had three stars on one side. Embossed on the other side were the words, “Warrior Citizen: Presented for Excellence.”

“I’ll cherish that forever,” he said.

In 2004, the ESGR handled 6,000

complaint cases. By 2007, the num-ber had fallen to 2,600 and stayed

at that level in 2008.

J

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PHOTO: Spc. Daniel Herrera

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