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Corps means business on tracking gear

If there is gear and equipment missing from your base, the Corps wants to know why.

Marine officials are launching a series of inspections that will eventually reach the stateside supply and maintenance accounts of every active-duty unit. The inspections will assess how equipment is tracked and where the Corps needs to fix flaws in its logistics systems.

“We’ve done studies out in theater,” said Col. Adele Hodges, director of the Marine Corps Inspector General Readiness Division. “Now, we’re going to look at our processes at home and do what we call a home-station assessment.”

The first round of stateside inspections is part of the IG’s Supply and Maintenance Management Assessment, a one-time study of selected Marine units that’s aimed at improving data management and equipment-readiness reporting aboard bases and stations, officials said.

The inspections will include a review of each unit’s records, as well as a check for compliance with Marine orders and directives, Hodges said. An inventory of equipment is part of that process, with a sampling of gear and most records reviewed. Both serialized items — weapons, body armor, optics and the like — and nonserialized items such as field office equipment, netting and tents will be inspected.

The IG inspections are the second phase in a four-step review process, and no timeline has been set for the audits to begin. The first phase is expected to wrap up soon, with IG officials compiling information collected during a series of surveys and focus groups held with Marines — and their commanders — who handle supply and maintenance, Hodges said. The IG’s office will inspect an undisclosed “sampling” of units from all three Marine Expeditionary Forces, incorporating its findings into an assessment report.

But the Corps isn’t stopping there. In a separate move, the Logistics and Installations division at Marine Corps Headquarters plans to relaunch an organization focused almost entirely on ensuring Marine units comply with logistics regulations.

Likely to be named the Field Supply and Maintenance Analysis Office, the unit will inspect the books of every active-duty unit in the Corps annually, and offer training to help Marines understand how to track equipment, gear and vehicles correctly, said Col. Peter Keating, head of the Logistics Vision and Strategy Branch. No timeline for its formation has been announced, but Keating said inspections could begin as soon as this fall.

Why now?

Marine officials said the recommendation for more stateside inspections was made in 2008, following an IG readiness assessment of equipment deployed to Iraq that checked the records for everything from vehicles to weapons to optics.

That investigation marked the third time since 2005 that the IG researched Iraq equipment accountability. Marine officials would not release the full 2008 report to Marine Corps Times, but an executive summary outlines a variety of logistical challenges.

“Poor accounting procedures have led to inaccurate and incomplete supply and maintenance management data,” the summary said. “Inexperience and poor training in proper supply procedures are factors that contributed to this problem.”

That doesn’t sound flattering, but Keating and Hodges said the 2008 assessment found dramatic improvements in equipment accountability when compared to 2005 and 2006. At that time, the Corps was in “kind of a catch-up mode,” Hodges said, with equipment shipped from the U.S. to Iraq not reaching theater until after the requesting units had rotated out.

To solve that problem, the Corps stood up Logistics Command Forward, a spinoff of LogCom that has relied on a mix of about 200 Marines, contractors and civilian employees to track nearly all gear moving in and out of Iraq since 2006, Keating said.

Headquartered in Jacksonville, Fla., with Blount Island Command, LogCom (Fwd.) oversees equipment movements with personnel in Kuwait, at Blount Island and at Camp Taqaddum, said Col. Joe Haviland, outgoing commander at Blount Island.

Keating said creating the forward element enabled the Corps to track equipment “through a single node,” improving accountability and lessening the pressure on individual units that were already fighting a war.

“Quite frankly, sometimes a unit was engrossed with current operations,” Keating said. “Accounting for a piece of equipment — joining it to your records — lapsed because of op tempo.”

The move to study accounts outside war zones can be considered “a migration thing” needed to assess the Corps’ inventory across the globe, Hodges said.

“We knew what we looked like in 2003 when the [Iraq] war kicked off, and we’ve done a lot of moving equipment around in theater and within the United States, and we’ve done a couple of studies to see how we’re doing in theater,” she said. “We said, ‘Let’s take a look at our accountability at home.’”

Marine officials said the IG investigation or the adoption of annual Corps-wide inspections have nothing to do with recent instances of optics, body armor and other sensitive items appearing for sale on Web sites like Craigslist and eBay.

“If the question is, ‘is that driving our efforts?’ I can tell you unequivocally, no,” Keating said. “But it is a concern, anytime you have [the theft of] sensitive or serialized, controlled items.”

Inspections in focus

While the IG’s pending report will serve as a barometer for how well supply and maintenance is handled by Marines, the planned formation of the Field Supply and Maintenance Analysis Office, or FSMAO, will have an immediate impact Corps-wide once it is launched.

Currently, the Corps has data assurance teams made up primarily of retired staff noncommissioned officers with experience in supply and administration who inspect Marine units around the globe. The teams are working to remove record-keeping mistakes so that when the Corps adopts its next computer system, it can upload accurate information.

The teams focus on correcting the Corps’ records, however, not making sure that Marine units follow orders. FSMAO, (pronounced FAZE-mo) will take it a step further, performing inspections and demanding compliance with Marine directives and orders, Keating said.

Before it was absorbed into logistics modernization teams around 2003, FSMAO was “known as somewhat of a Draconian organization,” Keating said. But at least some Marines missed the service it provided.

“There’s a clamor from the field and from headquarters to bring back that compliance organization known as FSMAO, but not in its old form,” Keating said. “It has to be more of a training and mentoring organization. [It needs to be] coming in there to make sure you’re compliant, to make sure you’re joining your equipment to your records, that you’re maintaining it properly, that you’re reporting it as you’re supposed to be, but… also doing the training and mentoring required to get there.”

This time around, the organization will be friendlier, Keating said. When problems are found with a unit’s bookkeeping, the average staff sergeant or second lieutenant handling supply orders will receive training — so long as everything is on the up-and-up — rather than simply watching as a scathing report is filed by inspectors and sent up his chain of command.

Instances of apparent equipment theft will remain an issue for authorities, such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, officials said.

“Sometimes, if we don’t really look at the process, we’re wedded to archaic and legacy and stovepipe ways of doing business, and we’ll just go in there and hammer them for it — not being compliant — without addressing the real cause,” Keating said.

That’s also where the IG assessment of stateside bases comes in. Once inspections are completed for the investigation, the IG’s office will seek feedback from the commanders of units assessed, and interview rank-and-file Marines who handle the bookkeeping on a day-to-day basis.

“They can control what they control,” Keating said. “If [a Marine doesn’t] have the correct tech data or that information doesn’t flow through all the logistics systems down to him and we’re hammering that guy, that’s wrong. This assessment will inform how we do business with FSMAO in the future.”

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