Army National Guard: Sharing Unit Training Equipment Would Help Avoid Maintenance Costs
Abstract
The Army National Guard has approximately $38 billion worth of equipment assigned to its 54 separate state and territorial military commands. The equipment is mostly used during peacetime to train units in the event that they are needed to reinforce or replace active force components during wartime. Equipment predominantly used for units' 2-week annual training is located at Mobilization and Training Equipment Sites (MATES). There are 24 MATES located throughout the United States, and almost half of them will have equipment that belongs to more than one unit. During the last several years, the Guard has spent over $756 million annually to maintain its equipment. However, this amount has not been enough to fund required scheduled maintenance and repairs on equipment that has deteriorated. As a result, the Guard had a maintenance backlog of 2.3 million labor hours as of September 1996. To help reduce this backlog, the Guard developed the Controlled Humidity Preservation Program. The goal of the program is to preserve up to 25 percent of the Guard's combat ready ground equipment, including tanks, Bradley fighting Vehicles, self-propelled howitzers, and recovery vehicles, in a controlled humidity environment for up to 5 years. The program will eliminate the need to perform scheduled and unscheduled maintenance on the preserved equipment, which will permit the Guard to concentrate its limited maintenance resources on the remaining equipment and gradually reduce the maintenance backlog.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA329548
Entities
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office