Borrowing from private industry, the Army is adopting enterprise solutions to control its logistics operations.

The enterprise system will give Army leaders seamless control of its materiel support forces "from manufacturer to foxhole," said Maj. Gen. Vincent Boles, the service's assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics, yesterday at the Army Logistics Symposium here.

Right now, the Army handles its supply, transport and maintenance tasks with information systems that date to the 1970s.

But to support its soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and keep the rest of the Army ready to fight, the service is replacing that collage of logistics IT systems with its Single Army Logistics Enterprise, using the best practices of commercial industry.

Without such a unified system, Boles said, "it was an event to go through and find out how many [of the armored vehicles called] Strykers we had."

Funded now, the logistics enterprise system should be fully fielded by 2015-2016, he said, and include not only the active-duty Army but its National Guard and Reserve components.

If a soldier shoots it, drives it, flies it, transports it, fixes it, wears it or eats it, logistics is involved.

The modernized logistics enterprise system will provide better, faster support to the boots-on-the-ground warfighter at lower cost to the taxpayer, the Army says.

And Army logistics is a big enterprise.

With a total budget of about $250 billion, the Army has challenged its senior logisticians to make sure "that every dollar of that budget be spent wisely," said Maj. Gen. Mitchell H. Stevenson, commander of Fort Lee and the Army's Combined Arms Support Command there.

About 270,000 soldiers -- roughly a third of the Army -- are "loggies," and the Army's transformation in the era of the war on terrorism is making Fort Lee the service's logistics center.

His Army Materiel Command alone has a budget of $47.4 billion, said Gen. Benjamin S. Griffin, an Emporia native and Old Dominion University graduate.

But, Griffin said, "it all goes back to who's my customer -- the soldier in the field."

More than 400 of the Army's top logisticians and industrial contractors are attending at the three-day professional development forum at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

The symposium represents "the intellectual underpinning for what's going to happen and what could happen," said retired Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, former Army chief of staff and head of the Association of the U.S. Army, the conference's sponsor.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, "the Army's stressed and stretched," said Lt. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody, the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics.

The U.S. faces years of conflict abroad, Army leaders cautioned the symposium audience.

"We will be in this fight for a long, long time," Boles said.
Contact Peter Bacque at (804) 649-6831 or pbacque@timesdispatch.com.