Photo By Michelle Gordon | David Hargett, director of the U.S. Army Test, Measurement and Diagnostic Equipment...... read more read more
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The U.S. Army Test, Measurement and Diagnostic Equipment Activity, a subordinate element of the Aviation and Missile Command, hosted an inaugural cross-organizational workshop June 25-27 at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama.
The event brought TMDE support providers from across the Army, as well as stakeholders from U.S. Army Forces Command, Combined Arms Support Command, the Army National Guard, the Army Medical Logistics Command and other organizations who have a crucial role in providing calibration repair support.
Robert Mitchell, the USATA deputy director for management operations, said the idea for a workshop had been discussed for some time and will soon be an annual requirement in a forthcoming update to Army Regulation 750-43, the Army policy on TMDE support.
“We have been working through an update to the regulation for the last couple of years, and one of the requirements is for USATA to host an annual workload workshop,” Mitchell said. “This being the first one, we talked about the state of the Army TMDE enterprise and set some goals, but future workshops will focus more on workload distribution.”
Although headquartered at Redstone Arsenal, USATA is a global organization with 42 support activity sites in 22 states, seven countries, and three continents. It is responsible for 850,000 items across the Army, other Department of Defense claimants and thousands of industrial-based customers. Calibration personnel ensure Army weapons systems operate safely and correctly.
“There are 128 organizational elements that provide calibration repair support across the force, and USATA only has 42 of them, even though we are the lead organization for the Army calibration repair support program,” Mitchell said. “The enterprise is pretty broad, from the active component to the Army National Guard and the Army Medical Logistics Command. The goal of the workshop is to gain a shared understanding of the current challenges we’re all facing across the program, what the requirements are and where we’re headed in the future.”
USATA Director David Hargett said one of the main challenges is communicating the criticality of the program to commanders and other non-TMDE personnel. During the workshop, one attendee asked about changing the perception of calibration to commanders on the ground because rather than being associated with readiness, it is often associated with delinquencies.
Hargett said TMDE should ultimately be incorporated into the Global Combat Support System-Army, the Army's tactical logistics and financial management information enterprise resource planning program.
“As far as the Army enterprise is concerned, we need to move USATA into G-Army,” he said. “Commanders are not seeing it, so it is out of sight, out of mind. We are providing the data manually to them, but they should get a report that shows their TMDE on a regular basis.”
He added that understanding calibration and convincing others to understand it can be difficult at times, which was one of the challenges discussed at the workshop.
“I’m excited about the future of this workshop because it brings all stakeholders together to discuss how we can improve calibration across the Army,” Hargett said. “Our goal is to provide accurately calibrated TMDE, so the warfighters can use and depend on that TMDE — whether it’s a pitot-static test set on the flight line for helicopter maintenance or a torque wrench on a track vehicle — it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s important that it be calibrated properly.”
| Date Taken: | 07.05.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 07.11.2024 17:40 |
| Story ID: | 475995 |
| Location: | REDSTONE ARSENAL, ALABAMA, US |
| Hometown: | HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA, US |
| Web Views: | 16 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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