Afloat Prepositioning

In a review of war reserves prepositioned aboard military vessels, GAO found rusting equipment, dead batteries, and deteriorating engine parts on Army ships loaded with supplies destined for the front lines in the event of a sudden military conflict. Because of the tendency of weapons and equipment to deteriorate while aboard ships and the inherent limitations in the Army's ability to do maintenance aboard ships, GAO recommends that the Army ensure that unit sets of equipment that affect the readiness of the brigade set are filled to their authorized level. In addition, the Army should ensure that the equipment is up to standard before it is loaded onto the ships. These measures would increase the probability that the Army's goal of 90-percent full mission capability is achieved.

GAO noted that: (1) of the unit sets considered when reporting the readiness of the brigade set of war reserve equipment, about 25 percent do not meet the Army's readiness goal for full mission capability; (2) according to Army maintenance records, some equipment aboard prepositioning ships had been reported as non-mission capable since September 1995; (3) one factor that contributed to lower readiness rates was that some equipment was not fully mission capable when it was originally loaded on prepositioning ships; (4) other factors include the deterioration of the equipment while in storage aboard ships and the limited ability to conduct maintenance on the equipment while in storage; (5) the Army plans to repair equipment that does not meet readiness standards by conducting maintenance on prepositioning ships every 30 months; (6) in addition, Army doctrine calls for logistics support teams to perform maintenance on prepositioned war reserve equipment when it is downloaded before a deployment; (7) further, the Army is currently transferring equipment to prepositioning ships that have been designed to better control the humidity of the shipboard environment; (8) the Army has given priority to prepositioned ships in its plans to redistribute equipment from central Europe; (9) this should improve the readiness of those unit sets currently lacking equipment required for meeting the Army's readiness goal; (10) Army maintenance facilities in Charleston, South Carolina, were originally scheduled to be completed before October 1996, in time for the facilities to be used to conduct maintenance on the first full shipload of equipment prepositioned afloat; (11) however, contracts for development of the site and construction and renovation of buildings had not been completed, and the maintenance contractor had to continue to rely on temporary shelters and had to develop less efficient maintenance processes; (12) according to Army and contractor officials, the use of temporary facilities did not prevent the successful completion of the maintenance mission; (13) basic elements of the Army's automated inventory system for management of war reserves have been put in place, including maintenance and readiness reporting software modules; (14) as of July 1997, the Army was still developing and implementing its information system; and (15) proposed improvements to the system include linking the system database to existing Army maintenance management systems and incorporating a requisitioning capability.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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