The commander of the U.S. Army Materiel Command visited Hawaii April 9 through April 13 to discuss future plans and changes for Army logistics units.
The Army's first female four-star general, Gen. Ann Dunwoody, arrived in Hawaii for the last stop during her whirlwind tour that included the Sierra Army Depot, Fort Lewis, Wash., and stops in Korea. Dunwoody became the Army's top ranking female in November.
She visited Troops in Hawaii to see first-hand how the 8th TSC is doing in its transformation to becoming a modular theater sustainment command and to discuss new capabilities Soldiers can expect to see in the near future.
"I am so proud of the 8th TSC, MG [Raymond] Mason and his entire team," Dunwoody said. "They have taken on and transformed the legacy formation into a modular theater sustainment command, which gives the theater the capacity to support the modular operation force, so it's agile, expeditionary, and scalable."
"They have done a magnificent job. They are ahead of schedule because of the work they've done, as well as the exercises they have done to validate their capability," she added, referring to the command's recent exercise, which included deploying a forward command post to Japan.
During her visit, Dunwoody's schedule was jam-packed with a bevy of activities. She was the guest speaker at the 8th TSC's Spring Ball, participated in a golf scramble, and attended many meetings and office calls with Hawaii Army unit commanders. She also held a Leadership Professional Development conference for all officers and senior enlisted personnel to talk about changes in AMC and new capabilities and challenges, or as she called it "opportunities."
"It's an exciting time to be with AMC as the commanding officer to adapt the institutional piece of our Army. We've got a very agile, lethal, modular operational Army," Dunwoody said. "Part of the AMC piece is adapting to support Army forces generation models, which is a new way of generating forces."
"But it is going to be enduring, so we need to adapt our institutional processes to support this expeditionary and operational Army, and we have new capabilities that will help us do that, as well as the 8th TSC and other theater [sustainment commands]," she added.
As far as new capabilities, Dunwoody said the Army is now forming contracting support brigades.
"The Army Sustainment Command is relatively new — only four years since its inception," Dunwoody said. "Now we have field support brigades across the Army."
Dunwoody said that right now she believes the Army has a tremendous opportunity to transfer the institutional piece of the Army, and for theater commands, that is the materiel enterprise.
"That's a huge partnership with the AMC and other communities," Dunwoody said. "The opportunity for us to collaborate and create efficiency back to the 'Big Army' so the chief and secretary can make decisions on how to invest the savings created from efficiency in order to rebalance the Army."
"It's exciting to me, and I think we have huge opportunities here," she added.
Col. Stephen Fraunfelter, the 8th TSC support operations officer in charge, said that Gen. Dunwoody's visit gave logisticians here a big picture view of Sustainment — its current state and what to expect in the future.
"We gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how decisions are made at the Department of the Army level, as it affects AMC and the support to all army combatant areas," Fraunfelter said. "It's important to get the big picture so you understand what the changes in the short, mid, and long term will be. Gen Dunwoody was one of the architects for logistical modularity, and now we are living it. It's good to see the inside of what she sees and get an idea of how we got to be where we are at today."
| Date Taken: | 04.13.2009 |
| Date Posted: | 04.17.2009 16:40 |
| Story ID: | 32526 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 229 |
| Downloads: | 214 |
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