ARMY G-4
Aligning Sustainment's Role and Efforts in the Push to 2035
By Lt. Gen. Duane A. Gamble
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s Army sustainers, we must be prepared to anticipate our role and offer continued support to modernization efforts while serving as the stewards of what we currently use and will use to fight our adversaries. We do this by determining what excellence looks like in the generation, fielding, and maintenance of materiel capabilities. The need for this influence was evident during the Army’s last major modernization effort about 40
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July-September 2021
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years ago to counter Europe’s Warsaw Pact forces and establish dominance in AirLand Battle through the conception of the Big Five weapon systems—the Abrams tank, Bradley infantry vehicle, Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, and Patriot air and missile defense system. At that time, we were confronted with the need to develop the sustainment capabilities necessary to empower those systems for enduring operations. These critical capabilities—such as the heavy expanded mobility tactical truck and heavy equipment transporter—didn’t yet exist to keep pace with our weapon system usage. The resulting readiness gaps threatened our mobility. Developing, producing, fielding, and sustaining new capabilities is a complex, time-consuming process requiring congressional investment and synchronization across the Army. Altogether, fielding the Big Five took nearly 20 years, and the synchronization needed to arrive at final fielding was no small task. Early system development occurred just after Vietnam and came
Army Sustainment
before the AirLand Battle doctrine was finalized in the early 1980s. There is no doubt that the Big Five have proven critical in Army and joint force operations across a range of contingencies; however, modernizing the force and enabling readiness is not as simple as buying new systems. Keeping up with the speed of technological change creates training, doctrine, and organizational challenges emphasizing the need for sustained synchronization and a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities in getting to our endpoint. The Big Five modernization effort was marked by aggressive and revolutionary procurement. Our immediate needs and available resources will dictate how we undertake the next bout of transformational change—the landscape is different now than in the 1980s, meaning this may look more evolutionary. The recently updated Army Modernization Strategy outlines how we must fight, what we must fight with, and who we must be to
