BATTLE CREEK, Mich. –
In late March, the Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services site in Qatar became DOD’s most recent property disposal location to offer excess equipment for military unit reutilization, and the additional service has already benefitted the nation’s deployed defenders.
Greg Dangremond supervises reverse logistics at DLA’s Al Udeid Air Base location and singled out Property Disposal Specialist Carol Sain for her efforts in getting equipment reuse efforts off the ground there.
“She is the Swiss Army knife of the DLA Expeditionary Civilian program,” Dangremond said. “Not only is she all things [Reutilization/Transfer/Donation], but she can manage all our critical processes as well as operate all the material handling equipment on site.”
An Army veteran, Sain began her DLA career in Virginia in late 2019 as a material handler and identifier. When her soldier husband transferred to Colorado a few years later, she swapped roles within the agency and became a property disposal specialist at Fort Carson, where she handled property reuse and donation, inventory management, customer outreach, and DLA’s Warehouse Management System, among other duties. Since arriving in Qatar, Sain said she’s added equipment scrapping and demilitarization operations to her resume – which was the sole method for dealing with excess property at Al Udeid previously.
“With the assistance of the [DLA Central region] Accountable Officer Honner ‘Raul’ Carbajal-Sanchez, the business rules in WMS were adjusted to allow Qatar’s inventory to be available for reutilization,” Sain said. “It took approximately two weeks of communicating between myself, Raul, and Battle Creek to work out the kinks and testing in WMS by putting a chair on record to see whether it would go in reutilization status instead of automatically going into disposal status. The third attempt was a charm.”
Sain immediately began promoting property reuse opportunities to DLA’s local military customers and provided training to her fellow deployers. She printed flyers, emails, and met with warfighters to guide them through the rules of requesting and retrieving property.
“The whole DLA team has contributed to advertising the program to both military and DOD customers, as well as putting usable/serviceable property on record for reutilization,” Sain said.
From April through June, more than 80 excess property material readiness orders were issued to local reuse customers for equipment originally valued at about $1.5 million. The very first reuse recipient was a U.S. Army air defense artillery regiment that had recently arrived at Al Udeid to man Patriot missile defense systems. When the regiment visited the agency’s site to turn over unneeded property, they found a brand-new source of free equipment recently set up by Sain and the DLA team. The soldiers ended up requisitioning almost 50 items, including printers, monitors, office furniture, tools – and four prefabricated portable buildings to expand their operations and provide additional workspace for their command.
“Working together, with the goal of marketing them as mobile command and control trailers, DLA employees and contractors invested sweat equity removing all the server racks from four 40-foot server trailers that were turned in,” Dangremond wrote. “The successful retrofit and reutilization of the trailers, with a cumulative original acquisition value of nearly $1 million, demonstrated DLA Disposition Services’ ability to innovatively re-purpose scarce resources, save warfighting units money, and increase operational effectiveness.”
When it came time for the Patriot regiment to engage, they were ready.
Shortly before 8 p.m. local time on June 23, ballistic missiles launched from Iran streaked above the skies at Al Udeid, aimed at U.S. military targets. What transpired next was the largest Patriot missile defense system engagement in history, according to the Defense Department, and no U.S. or Qatari casualties or injuries were reported.
"Between attacking missiles being hit by Patriots, boosters from attacking missiles being hit by Patriots, the Patriots themselves flying around, and the debris from those Patriots hitting the ground, there was a lot of metal flying around," said Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a June 26 press conference. "Our U.S. air defenders had only seconds to make complex decisions with strategic impact. These awesome humans, along with their Qatari brothers and sisters in arms, stood between a salvo of Iranian missiles and the safety of Al Udeid.”