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News | June 11, 2015

Support for expeditionary missions one focus of Marine Corps-DLA Day

By By Beth Reece DLA Public Affairs

Defense Logistics Agency leaders and Marine Corps logisticians continued shaping the framework for future logistics support of the service’s 21st-century expeditionary mission at the annual Marine Corps-DLA Day June 9 at the McNamara Headquarters Complex.

DLA Director Air Force Lt. Gen. Andy Busch opened the event by assuring attendees that warfighter support remains the agency’s top priority.

“It’s the reason why all 26,000 employees in DLA come to work every day,” he said.

Busch gave a brief outline of the agency’s 2015-2022 Strategic Plan, which he described as a “refresh” of previous guidance rather than a completely new set of objectives. As DLA focuses on readiness, as well as aged and growing platforms, Busch said he is seeking input from leaders of each service on retail supply support.

“We were directed to do some things in the 2005 [Base Realignment and Closure] that, in my opinion, have been implemented in an uneven fashion across the services. So I have raised as a point of discussion amongst the national logistics leadership the question of do we want to relook at whether there are other opportunities or anything else left on the table that we ought to go back and see if we should focus on,” he said.

The agency has made great strides in saving money, but there are opportunities for both DLA and the services to better align their efforts to Better Buying Power 3.0, he continued. Performance-based logistics is one example.

“That’s one more way we can grow our business past the transactional ‘We need a part, we get a part’ – past the long-term contract route that we’ve been on for a number of years – and into other kinds of goodness that I think are the future of our relationship,” Bush said.

Lt. Gen. William Faulkner, deputy commandant of the Marine Corps for installations and logistics, said DLA’s support keeps getting better.

“I’m very pleased to see DLA’s No. 1 goal is about warfighting and readiness. We’ve been very pointed from the Marine Corps perspective in terms of what our priorities are. We’re very interested in doing things smarter, saving money and running things like a business, but if it really doesn’t add to warfighting and doesn’t increase readiness, we’re not very interested in it,” he said.

The Marine Corps shares DLA’s interest in technology and innovation, Faulkner added, especially as the service restructures and reevaluates its core competencies.

“We’re experimenting with technology. You’ll see that woven throughout our strategy. We’re talking about adaptive manufacturing; we’re talking about leveraging external agencies more than we ever have before,” he said.

The group also discussed ways of improving repair parts support by enhancing collaboration between the demand planners at the Marine Corps Logistics Command, DLA Land and Maritime, and customer service representatives located at production plants in Albany, Georgia, and Barstow, California. Other topics included improvements to the Marine Corps’ Global Combat Support System Advanced Planning Suite, issues that are creating delays and leading to the loss of Marine Corps material, and the plan for resetting the Marine Corps’ ground equipment.