Army Operating Concept

Under the Army Operating Concept: Win in a Complex World, Joint Forces and Army Commanders must establish the capability to rapidly anticipate, allocate, and synchronize the flow of sustained resources in order to equip, deploy/project, sustain, reconstitute, and redeploy forces in support of the national military strategy. Rapid, coordinated, and sustained support to the Army, Joint, and Allied Force is vital to successful military operations. Automation and communications supporting tactical logistics for sustainment must be a responsive, sufficient, and efficient. In order to accomplish this task, system interfaces must provide a seamless flow of information between all sustainment functional elements and users at all echelons. Due to

Over the past decade, many logisticians at the tactical and operational levels have become overwhelmed by the amount of data they are presented with forcing them to revert to a Microsoft Excel© version of tracking and forecasting. This process has, in fact, become so popular a number of management systems used during OIF/OEF were based on Excel spreadsheets. Although, this may be an effective form of communicating a requirement, tracking the fulfillment of that requirement in the short term, fails to meet the strategic intent of systems like GCSS-Army. The primary operational advantage of GCSS-Army is to integrate multiple legacy logistics systems at the tactical level so there is one point of entry to a system which is designed to inform multiple stakeholders of a requirement and the current force. The Excel© method of cargo tracking may work to some extent at the tactical level due to the fluidity of an operation, but it fails at the operational and strategic level to account for dollar amounts and degrades the ability to account for cargo moving through the strategic leg of the DTS. A lack of integrated information flow between transportation management systems has forced movement managers to build Ad Hoc spreadsheet processes which are lost upon rotation out of an area of

Instead, America faces a complex environment, which poses a wide range of possible threats under chaotic conditions, with local events now having global consequences. Regular and irregular forces, criminals, refugees, mercenaries and others are intermingling on the Internet across space. Cyberspace and social networks allow non-state actors the ability to recruit, communicate, plan, and select from a variety of affordable technologies, which can be used in unconventional ways to directly wage war on the United States and its allies. These same weapons, are used through cyberspace to launch indirect attacks aimed at the disruption of economies, infiltration of computer systems with the ultimate goal collapsing many of the more unstable governments around the world resulting in geopolitical turmoil, even wars. This is why it becomes critical for the Army to find one system, which cannot only create efficiency within the Transportation and Distribution business process, but can do so in a secure environment, and located in undeveloped areas. The system which has been tasked to accomplish this on a tactical level will be