Combat Service Support Transformation: Emerging Strategies for Making the Power Projection Army a Reality
Abstract
To produce a strategically responsive force, the Army has embarked on a transformation effort to make power projection capabilities a reality. To be strategically responsive, the Army must be able to rapidly move or project forces that have sufficient power to execute a broad spectrum of missions. The Army has laid out a set of three CSS transformation goals to support this overall transformation effort. The first goal is to reduce footprint in the combat zone to improve strategic mobility and to improve operational mobility. The second goal, focused on strategic mobility, is to reduce deployment timelines. The targets are 96 hours for a brigade combat team (BCT), 120 hours for a division, and 30 days for five divisions (and the requisite support). We term these two goals "power projection goals." Beyond these two goals, there is a third: reducing the cost of logistics while maintaining warfighting capability. Rather than an end in itself, this is a means to fund new Army capabilities. We term this a "business process transformation goal," which might be viewed as a second, simultaneous transformation that is focused internally on how the Army does its business. In this document we only examine the first two goals - the power projection goals - describing the strategies emerging to reach these goals and presenting metrics for assessing progress toward achieving them. The intent of this research was to distill, from the Army's Interim and Objective Force design efforts and other sources, strategies for achieving the Army's power projection oriented CSS transformation goals. With respect to the proposed complementary metrics-based framework for evaluating further force design efforts, we illustrate the use of these metrics through an examination of the Stryker Brigade Combat Team (SBCT).
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2003
- Accession Number
- ADA428306
Entities
People
- Eric Peltz
- John M. Halliday
- Steven L. Hartman
Organizations
- RAND Corporation