Everything Must Go!

Operation Clean Sweep was an Army initiative started in 2009 to begin identifying and shipping out all manner of non mission-critical gear from Iraq that was sitting around unused at the big forward operating bases across the country. In less than a year, the operation shipped 30,000 containers of gear out of the country while putting $1.8 billion worth of equipment back into the Army supply system. Spearheaded by the Army’s 13th Sustainment Command (ESC), based out of Ft. Hood Texas, the program relied on small Mobile Redistribution Teams to fan out across Iraq, opening containers and asking units what gear they had, and what they didn’t need. Back in June I highlighted a DoD Inspector General report that outlined some of the failings of the program--none of which fell on the 13th ESC, but instead were focused on insufficient guidance from the chain of command and units who were less than cooperative with the Mobile Redistribution Teams who came to tag and bag their unused gear.

In a recent conversation, Col. Gust Pagonis, Support Operations Officer for the 13th ESC, described the complexity of the task: “imagine if you didn’t go though your garage for seven years--what that would look like. Well, multiply that to the size of Iraq.” Col. Pagonis--whose father Lt. Gen. William G. Pagonis was in charge of Army’s logistics operations at the time of the 1991 Persian Gulf war--also downplayed the problems that his soldiers faced with units on the ground, saying that any initial friction that existed, “dissipated once they saw how quickly we could get rid of their stuff.”

Much of the work involved soldiers literally walking into a container or a room full of equipment with a handheld scanner and scanning the items into an Army-wide database that can track what supplies are at depots all the way down to the brigade level. For the "Green" Army equipment this worked well, but the 13th had to develop a “White” database for the commercial off the shelf gear they they came across. Once the green items were logged in, the database would automatically scan across the system and route it to a unit that needed such an item, even going so far as to print shipping instructions.

The 13th actually had what can be considered a practice run at Ft. Hood in 2008 when it was tasked with identifying material that was lying unused, but could be put back into the supply chain. In just a few months the unit identified $65 million worth of gear that other units could use, but was collecting dust at Ft. Hood. That’s all good, but as we know, there are times when the military falls down in the lessons learned aspect of successful programs. Col. Pagonis pointed out that the 13th has briefed subsequent sustainment units heading to Iraq to complete the drawdown of U.S. forces, and has also submitted their lessons learned to the command in Afghanistan so that operation can eventually benefit from the 13th’s experience.

Tags: iraq, ar99