RAND Arroyo Center Research Brief: Keeping the Army's Equipment Ready to Fight. A New Tool for Understanding Equipment Readiness
Abstract
The Army Transformation places an increased premium on the Army's ability to efficiently keep its equipment ready to fight. The Army envisions relatively small but highly capable units that will deploy rapidly and then engage immediately in highly mobile operations. Because of the need to keep these units light enough for quick deployment and agile maneuver, their support structures must be lean. Yet these lean support organizations must still be able to repair broken equipment quickly. A unit with many weapon systems unable to fight or move will soon become ineffective and vulnerable. The Army cannot realize this vision with today's weapon systems and support capabilities. Achieving the vision will require dramatic improvement in levels of both equipment supportability (i.e., reliability, maintainability, durability, and commonality) and support process effectiveness and efficiency. Such progress requires a detailed understanding of the factors that affect equipment readiness-both the causes of equipment failure and the contributions of each support process in repairing broken vehicles. To help improve the Army's understanding of equipment readiness, RAND Arroyo Center researchers have developed a management and analysis tool that is the focus of a new report, Diagnosing the Army's Equipment Readiness The Equipment Downtime Analyzer (EDA). The EDA enables Army managers to better understand and measure the impact of support processes and resources, equipment usage, and failure rates on readiness. Most important in preparing for the future, EDA data can help the Army evaluate equipment readiness performance in situations involving high operational tempo.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADA405621
Entities
Organizations
- RAND Corporation