November 2008 after more than 30
years in the military. He received his
commission in 1976, after graduating
from the University of California, Los
Angeles, where he had participated in
the Navy ROTC program. In the years
that followed, he served in a variety of
positions in the Navy and earned a
number of awards, including the
Distinguished Service Medal. Since he
achieved flag rank, his assignments
have included duty as commander of
the DLA’s Defense Supply Center in
Columbus, Ohio; director of the supply, ordnance, and logistics operations
division (N41), Office of the Chief of
Naval Operations; and as commander,
Naval supply systems command and
chief of supply corps. He met recently
with DC VELOCITY Editor at Large
Steve Geary to talk about the agency’s
current activities as well as its future.
QMany of our readers are unfamiliar with the DLA, so let’s begin there. Would it be fair to describe you as
sort of a Wal-Mart Super Center for the military?
AI did a tour as the center commander in Columbus [DLA’s Defense Supply Center in Columbus, Ohio],
and I remember being asked, “Well, aren’t you just Wal-Mart?” The reality is, that might describe a thin slice of
what DLA does, but DLA is a full-spectrum logistics service
provider and so, its activities are a lot broader.
QCan you provide an example of how the DLA does more than simply serve as a mega-supply center?
AA little story from Iraq: We visited the Taji national maintenance staff in the region north of Baghdad. It
essentially is the sole depot [for maintaining, repairing, and
overhauling ground vehicles] that the Iraqi army has for
ground combat. We have a DLA team there that is assisting
the Iraqi army in bringing its maintenance activity on line.
What they are primarily focused on right now is overhauling Humvees that came from U.S. stocks, and they are
doing a full overhaul. DLA’s role has a couple of dimensions.
One is providing much of the material support to do the
depot maintenance work. The other is helping them establish a distribution center capability so that they [the Iraqi
army] can in fact bring their own supply system up on line.
It is just overwhelming the enthusiasm these guys have
for what they’re doing. They have actually only been there
about six months, but you can tell what a huge impact
they’ve had in that time in helping the Iraqi security forces
essentially develop their own sustainment capability. As you
travel around, it is quite striking how engaged we are now
at the forward end of the supply chain, largely providing the
types of commodities that DLA is responsible for, but in
some ways, also helping with technical expertise to bring on
line some of their own DLA-like capabilities.
QDLA started out as a wholesale provider of items required by the military. What you are describing
seems to be more of a customer-facing, demand-driven
organization.
ABeing focused and having a forward presence is an important part of where DLA is going in the future—
particularly in the Middle East. We need to have a very
robust physical presence of DLA personnel where our major
customers are. We have DLA support teams that are embedded with our major customers, and in effect, they are a forward touch point to removing barriers that may exist in the
integrated supply chain. We now have pretty robust staffing
forward that covers the full spectrum of DLA support, and
frankly, we have gotten very positive reviews from that.
QCan you provide some examples of how that plays out in practice?
AWe’re putting a lot of the emphasis right now on logis- tics support for the arriving forces in Afghanistan. As
you know, it is a very austere area from the standpoint of
infrastructure. A lot of effort right now is just moving what
is needed in place to build the operating bases. It is everything from lodging to you-name-it.
Of course, most everything there has to be taken in on a
truck over a 500-plus mile dirt road through mountains. As
it comes up from Karachi in Pakistan through a couple of
points of entry into Afghanistan, there have been considerable concerns with not only volume of flow but also with
security of those routes, so we are working very intensively
with U.S. Central Command and U.S. Transportation
Command to open what is called the Northern
Distribution Network—lines of communication or supply
from the north through the Central Asian states. It is a very
complex issue with lots of host-nation dimensions from the
standpoint of flow of material, but we have been very successful moving it all forward.
I think that our forward presence and close connection to
the combatant commanders has been a huge enabler for
their mission effectiveness. Whether you look at DLA people deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq or back home at some
of our major field commands, there is very tight connectivity. The more of that we have, the more effective we are
going to be.
