Services Trying to Pump New Life Into Aging Gear.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: United States armed forces

As the nation's military weaponry and other equipment grow increasingly older, the armed services are struggling to find better ways to keep those systems running as long as possible.

"The Department of Defense is facing significant challenges," Roger Kallock, who was deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness at the time, told the 4th Annual Defense Department's Maintenance Symposium and Exhibition in Charleston, S.C.

U.S. combat forces, he noted, include "platforms [that are] more than 30 years old and ... programmed to remain in active service as much as 40 additional years--70-year-old platforms!"

The Air Force, for example, has announced its intention to retain the B-52 bomber, which has been flying since 1954, for four more decades.

"You know, it was suggested, in jest, that the theme for this conference might be, 'It really is your grandfather's B-52,'" said Kallock. "There's a lot of truth in that bit of humor. It illustrates the challenges our maintainers are up against."

Military maintenance challenges dwarf those in the private sector, Kallock told the conference, which was sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. The largest commercial airline has about 600 aircraft, of relatively few types. By way of comparison, he said, the Defense Department has:

* About 8,300 combat, 6,000 airlift and 3,500 other aircraft, nearly 150 major types.

* More than 500 ships, ranging in size from aircraft carriers to patrol boats.

* Roughly 464,000 tactical missiles and 1,000 strategic missiles with associated targeting, communications and avionics systems.

* A total of 250,000 combat and tactical vehicles.

* Millions of other pieces of equipment, including small arms, radars, communications setups and electrical-generation systems.

The work of maintaining, repairing and rebuilding all of this gear costs more than $40 billion per year, Kallock said.

Small and medium-size jobs are performed at the field level--in the units around the world where the equipment is used. Major repairs, overhauls or complete rebuilding are done at depots, shipyards and logistics centers run by each of the services.

Some jobs, however, are too big even for the services' largest facilities. When the USS Cole, an Arleigh Burke-class or Aegis guided missile destroyer, was damaged grievously last year by a terrorist attack in Yemen, it was brought back not to a Navy shipyard, but to the Litton Ingalls Shipbuilding facility in Pascagoula, Miss., for repairs.

The work will cost an estimated $240 million--about two thirds of the cost of a new ship--and take up to a year to complete. It could have been done at the Navy's shipyard in Norfolk, Va., the Cole's home port, but the service decided that it was best to have it done by workers experienced in building this kind of ship. Ingalls built the Cole.

Some of the service-owned shipyards and depots date back to the nation's early history. Most were built during World War II or the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, however, they have been downsized significantly, as part of the base-realignment-and-closure (BRAC) process.

In the past decade, a total of 19 such facilities have closed or are in the process of doing so, according to a report from the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the armed services committees. "These actions will leave 19 major (i.e., greater than 400 employees) maintenance depots," said the report.

"Employment of federal government civilians in Defense Department depots is down nearly 59 percent since fiscal year 1987 (from a high of 156,000 in 1987 to the currently level of approximately 63,738)," according to the report.

The military services also are having trouble recruiting and retaining uniformed maintenance personnel. Numbers of uniformed technicians have dropped below 600,000--16 percent fewer than in 1994, said Kallock. They are also older and more diverse, he said.

"The average active-duty maintainer's age has increased by two years over the past six years--from 26 to 28 years old," Kallock said. Younger officers in the maintenance field now include a higher concentration of females and minorities than in 1994, he said.

"Our maintainers frequently are compared to their private-sector...