Courtesy Photo | Soldiers with the 308th Medical Logistics Company, an Army Reserve unit out of Utah,...... read more read more
SAGAMI ARMY DEPOT, Japan -- Seventeen Army Reserve Soldiers out of Utah trained alongside U.S. Army Medical Logistics Command team members for two weeks during Operation Patriot Press in July, helping to preserve readiness of forward-positioned medical equipment and supplies.
Members of the 308th Medical Logistics Company, based in St. George, Utah, under the 807th Medical Command (Deployment Support), integrated with key staff at the Army Prepositioned Stocks site in Japan, known as APS-4J, to complete care of supplies in storage, or COSIS, operations.
“We recently completed Defender 24, so we’ve been focused on reconstitution and resetting these hospital sets for future reissue,” said Lt. Col. Ibrahim Kabbah, AMLC’s assistant chief of staff for support operations and Army Reserve liaison officer. “The additional manpower that OPP provides means a lot to our overall readiness levels and meets our commander’s intent of leveraging COMPO 2 and 3 assets in completing our APS missions.”
An annual Army Materiel Command exercise, OPP is designed to promote readiness by providing real-world training opportunities for active-duty, Reserve, National Guard sustainment units and other service branches, while supporting the Army’s overall strategic positioning objectives.
It’s the second year that AMLC, the Army’s Life Cycle Management Command for medical materiel, has participated in OPP, integrating a medical component into the exercise.
The OPP program is especially valuable for AMLC, according to Kabbah, in that trained National Guard and reserve MEDLOG units would then be able to fall in on medical assets in the future, such as those positioned at APS-4J, “and automatically be able to operate” in a real-world event.
“They will understand our systems, how to operate them and create the force multiplication we need to be able to win wars,” he said. “I think every time AMLC participates in this exercise it reassures me that there’s one more unit in another COMPO that knows how our APS works.”
Meeting the 308th MLC on the ground were members from the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency, U.S. Army Medical Materiel Center-Korea and other enterprise-level MEDLOG planning staff.
USAMMA and USAMMC-K are both direct reporting units to AMLC.
The Army Reserve unit broke into several teams, working to inventory, reorganize and repack military hospital sets stored in USAMMA’s warehouse at APS-4J to prepare for long-term storage and potential future deployments.
Staff Sgt. Juan Zapata of the 308th MLC said the training event provided the unit with a great opportunity to put their skills into practice with the actual medical materiel they would be handling in a real-world contingency.
“Working with APS-4J, we had an abundance of Class VIII, which allowed for all Soldiers to handle materiel, take part of processes and make mistakes and learn,” he said.
Zapata further underscored the benefits of being able to train as they would fight, saying it helps to build relationships with their active-duty counterparts, as well as enterprise resource planning staff and other service components.
“Establishing a rapport with COMPO 1, 2 and contractors facilitates a smoother integration in the event we do encounter a real-world event,” Zapata said. “Our Soldiers are now more prepared to execute MEDLOG tasks within an APS-level environment. They are also more familiar with the outside entities tied to our organization and realize the importance of MEDLOG within the Army’s mission.
“Unfortunately, outside of deployments, individual assignments or a collective training event, most reserve Soldiers will only see a reserve center for much of their career,” he added. “This event has already increased our retention rates and has Soldiers motivated for the next mission.”
Even in a simulated training environment like OPP, Kabbah said APS operations are always treated as real-world missions, resulting in the right medical materiel getting to the right place at the right time in order to save lives on the battlefield.
“In our view, we treat every mission as real world,” he said. “Because if there’s a call for a field hospital to be set up, it’s a real mission for us. It doesn’t matter if it’s an exercise or a real contingency.”
| Date Taken: | 08.20.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 08.20.2024 11:40 |
| Story ID: | 479036 |
| Location: | SAGAMIHARA, JP |
| Web Views: | 89 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, AMLC integrates medical readiness into Operation Patriot Press training exercise, by C.J. Lovelace, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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