BATTLE CREEK, Mich. –
Elements of the U.S. Army 10th Combat Aviation Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, out of Fort Drum, New York, have recently been working against a hard deadline to offload used and excess equipment as part of the Army Transformation Initiative.
Maj. Nick Berry, squadron operations officer for 6th Squadron, 6th Cavalry Regiment, said that the unit was inactivating and the goal was to divest all of the equipment prior to the inactivation date.
The squadron recently turned over its excess, non-property book items to the Defense Logistics Agency Disposition Services team, including outdated and unserviceable gear. Berry said clearing out the equipment was an important step toward meeting their required timeline.
“Cleaning all of this stuff out allows us to restore some of these [Fort Drum] buildings to their normal facilities,” Berry said.
To manage the process, the unit created its own Squadron Excess Consolidation Point, where soldiers gathered gear to be palletized and prepared for turn-in. Instead of overland transport, the load was flown by Chinook helicopters from another battalion in the brigade to the DLA Disposition Services Susquehanna site excess property yard. Berry said using internal aviation assets was key to meeting the deadline.
“It was definitely a large muscle movement for us to get this done, and I’m glad we were able to utilize the assets across the combat aviation brigade to accomplish the mission,” he said.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jake Bennefield, a Chinook pilot with 310th General Support Aviation Battalion, 10th Combat Aviation Brigade, 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, said the flights that moved the equipment to Pennsylvania also provided critical training for his crews.
“They’re divesting their equipment, and we were able to knock out some training as well, so kind of a two-for-one deal,” Bennefield said.
Bennefield said soldiers used two CH-47F Chinooks to move the property, each with two pilots and two flight engineers.
“It’s a good repetition practicing, putting on cargo with forklifts and finding landing zones that we don’t typically go to,” he said. “It is very similar to things that we would do on a deployment.”
The pilot said they had to develop a plan to refuel the aircraft, operate in busy airspace, and land in unfamiliar locations. The logistical factors added additional layers of realism to the training for Army air crews.
“We brought three soldiers from 6-6,” the pilot said. “One of the soldiers ran the forklift that actually pulled the equipment out of the helicopter and then a DLA employee pulled it from the pad and onto a truck.”
Once the property was on a truck in Pennsylvania it was transported across Naval Support Activity Mechanicsburg to DLA Disposition Services Susquehanna Area Manager Chris Stouffer and his local reverse logistics team.
“I've been here over eight years now and that's definitely the first conveyance by helicopter that that we've ever received,” Stouffer said.
Stouffer said his team screens the property turn-ins as usual, and any equipment with additional use will be marked as still serviceable and listed in DLA’s excess property listings where reuse customers can request it.
Items that no longer have operational value and are not requested for reuse by transfer or donation customers are typically sold in public auctions or as scrap, and the proceeds help cover the costs of future military reverse logistics requirements.
Editors Note: Photos by Dorie Heyer DLA Distribution