$2b database to keep tabs on Army stocks.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: ANALYSIS

Seeking to manage a rapidly growing inventory of war equipment, the Army is spending nearly $2 billion on a new database that will track 3.4 billion items.

The Army decided to build this so-called "corporate database" because it did not have the means to capture its massive inventories of equipment in a cohesive manner.

As billions of dollars worth of new hardware poured into the Army during the past four years, it became more difficult for the senior leadership to grasp the rapidly expanding inventory.

"Equipping success had unintended consequences," says Lt. Gen. Anne E. Dunwoody, Army deputy chief of staff for logistics.

"The corporate database lets us see what we have in the Army," she says in a presentation to an industry conference. With the new system, the Army's senior staff will be able to pinpoint the location of 3.4 billion items and determine whether they should be moved elsewhere based on war needs, Dunwoody says.

To pay for the database costs, the Army received $306 million in fiscal year 2007, and is seeking $1.6 billion in the war-emergency budget request for 2008.

The corporate database, she says, is "critical" to the Army's ability to equip units in a timely manner so they can meet their deployment schedules. It also will help the Army more easily figure out what items should be eliminated from the inventory. The Army, for example, has 27,000 old, unusable vehicles that "we'd like to clean out," says Dunwoody.

In recent months, the Army has come under intense criticism for equipment shortages throughout units deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Defense Department inspector general issued a scathing report last month that was based on interviews with 1,100 soldiers in 2006. The report cited shortages of armored vehicles, electronic countermeasure devices, crew-sewed weapons and communications equipment.

"Service members stated that, when possible, they used informal procedures to obtain the force-protection equipment they needed to perform missions off base in Iraq and Afghanistan, including borrowing equipment from and trading equipment with other service members," the IG report says.

Army officials contend that claims of equipment shortages are exaggerated.

"There is a lot of confusion on whether we are taking care of soldiers," says Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, Army deputy chief of staff for resources. He says the Army is spending on average $17,000 per soldier to provide all the necessary equipment. "There will be no...