Lessons learned as far back as the Revolutionary War reinforced the Allies’ need for ready availability of warfighting supplies and equipment. But even by 1917, storage, movement and management of munitions and supplies to the armed forces was inadequate for the fight. Because the U.S. had not expected to enter the war, the nation had not planned for the expansion of the industrial base needed to produce more ordnance.
General of the Armies John “Blackjack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, opined in a postwar report to the secretary of war about the already overtaxed railway systems and available ports.
“The tonnage for material of an army three and perhaps four million men would require a mammoth program of shipbuilding at home, and miles of dock construction in France, with a correspondingly large project for additional railways and for storage depots,” the general wrote.
Regarding the issue of storage, Pershing wrote, “Practically all warehouses, supply depots and regulating stations must be provided by fresh construction. While France offered us such material as she had to spare after a drain of three years of war, yet there were enormous quantities of material to be brought across the Atlantic.”
Before WWI, the U.S. relied mostly on foreign companies and private supplies to meet ammunition needs, but the scope and nationwide mobilization of WWI led to the establishment of the War Industries Board in July 1917 to regulate military procurement and production. The Board set priorities, fixed prices and standardized products to support the allied war efforts, but it did not survive once the war ended.
Decades before the U.S. consolidated large-scale distribution and used commercial transportation to move materiel, the Allies relied on various modes of transportation. In addition to maritime and railway systems, armed forces used horses, mules and motorized vehicles to the extent they were available. It would be 70 years before USTRANSCOM was established as the single manager of America’s global defense transportation system.
Availability of resources was key to strategic movement, but storage for supplies and munitions was also a tremendous challenge throughout the war.
The New Cumberland Army Depot
It wasn’t until February 1918 that President Woodrow Wilson approved the purchase of land for two reserve depots — one near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the other near Schenectady, New York. The former was originally called the Marsh Run Storage Depot, but the official title was the U.S. Quartermaster Interior Storage Depot. On May 14, 1918, the Army first raised the flag over the warehouses in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania.
The warehouses and makeshift storage facilities, on more than 800 acres of farmland adjacent to the Susquehanna River and the North Central Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad, were the birthplace of what would become DLA Distribution headquarters.
Notwithstanding its various names, the installation has been in continuous operation as a supply source since it was built in 1918 for the Quartermaster Department. Initial construction consisted of storage, housing and support facilities, but the farmhouses, barns and associated structures on the property that the depot used in 1918 have been demolished.
The depot’s original mission of shipping supplies to troops in the field was short-lived. World War I ended less than three months after receipt of the first shipment of knocked-down wagons and saddles at the partially completed installation. Following the armistice, the depot was inundated with supplies that had been in contractors’ factories or en route to ports for overseas shipment. By April 1919, the warehouses served primarily as a reserve or dead storage depot, and only a small number of buildings were used to store quartermaster, signal, medical, engineer, chemical warfare and ordnance supplies.
Little permanent construction took place on the depot during the years before World War II. Between 1934 and 1937, excess warehouse space and open storage areas were leased to federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the Post Office Department, the Forest Service and the Treasury Department.
A New Purpose
In 1940-1941, the 1301st Service Unit Reception Center was built at the depot to process troops entering the Army. World War II brought increased activity to New Cumberland, when it served as a Quartermaster and Army Service Forces filler depot, responsible for channeling supplies to east coast ports. To support this supply mission, the number of storage facilities was doubled between 1942 and1943. A reception center for inductees and a hospital complex were built. Named the Army Service Forces Depot in 1943, the installation name changed to the New Cumberland General Depot in 1946, and the New Cumberland Army Depot in 1962.
Major construction projects since the war included a considerable expansion of family housing and storage facilities, an enlisted barracks and a new headquarters building constructed in 1952. In 1960, an aircraft hangar, along with maintenance shops, were constructed on the western portion of the site. These facilities served mainly as maintenance and repair facilities for U.S. Army helicopters and other aircraft. During the 1980s, most of those maintenance operations were eliminated, and NCAD’s mission was modified to function solely as a supply depot.
The NCAD was deactivated in April 1991 and assigned to DLA as Defense Distribution Region East, a regional headquarters responsible for the management of eight depot operations in the eastern United States. At the same time, the consolidation of Defense Depot Mechanicsburg and New Cumberland Army Depot created the Defense Distribution Depot Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, one of those depot operations.
Current Operations and Partnerships
Joe Faris, business development director at DLA Distribution, recalls the challenges that came with the consolidation and how the development of the Distribution Standard System simplified operations.
“When those sites transferred to us, every service had their own version of warehouse management systems, and you had what DLA was using at the time,” he said. “The single largest thing that DSS did for us and continues to do today is we can put anybody’s inventory — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or DLA, in any of our distribution centers around the globe.”
Faris’s job involves product development and market solutions to help DLA Distribution create long-term value and growth.
The growth of DLA Distribution’s mission is due in great part to the agency’s joint relationships with its strategic partners, Faris said.
“Today, at least from a [Department of Defense] standpoint, we do a much better job of joint logistics across all of our military services, DLA, USTRANSCOM and Army Materiel Command — they are further forward on the battlefield than they’ve ever been,” he said.
Faris stressed the importance of combined logistics operations DLA has with foreign partners such as the foreign military sales programs, the agency’s logistics capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how the U.S. has teamed up with the United Kingdom on initiatives like Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom.
“It’s a joint storage and distribution network that we didn’t have in 1917,” he said. “If you look at a map, we easily have a dozen overseas locations to support contingency operations today.”
Faris said a primary difference between WWI-era and current operations is the agency’s integration with its foreign partners and improved relationships with private industry.
Storage, Receipt and Inventory Innovations
Ed Visker, director of organizational management at DLA Distribution, currently manages leadership and workforce development as a civilian, but he also commanded two different distribution centers during his 27 years as an Army officer, and post-retirement, as deputy commander at the Susquehanna distribution center for several years.
“Back in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, when I first started managing distribution operations, the on time performance goals were three days to complete requisition processing for a high-priority item, and eight days for a routine requisition,” he said.
By the late ‘90s, Visker said, the DLA Distribution commander changed that processing time to one day. At that time, requisitions were in paper form; multi-part material release orders with copies to tear off and send with the package.
“The velocity increased dramatically from three and eight days to one-day processing,” Visker said.
“Today, we give ourselves one day for a high-priority requisition and three days for a routine requisition, but with DSS, we have the paperless capability and remote label printing. Back in the day, we didn’t even have bar codes,” Visker said.
Visker noted that DSS is both a warehouse management system and a transportation management system, but in the late ‘80s, they were still operating out of WWII “vintage” facilities with no automated systems.
“[They were] long, skinny buildings that were only about 12 feet high and had support posts every 20 feet; very hard to navigate in,” he said. “Some were knocked down and replaced through the military construction program and some, through repair and maintenance, had the lighting improved and had automated conveyor systems added.”
Visker said the new warehouses are four times the size, with a 26-foot stacking height and bright lighting.
“Our largest warehouse is the eastern distribution center here at New Cumberland — which is 33 football fields under one roof, or 1.7 million square feet,” he said. “About 600 people who work in that particular facility now. The entire distribution center consists of 53 warehouses on two different sites — all together it’s about 10 million square feet of storage space.”
Improved Asset Visibility
“One of the biggest changes in distribution came in 1991 with Defense Management Review Decision 902 [that] consolidated wholesale distribution, and DLA absorbed the distribution centers from all the services,” Visker said.
The development of DSS increased visibility of materiel in the depot system, and put it all in one automated system, as opposed to five.
“DSS has been modernized over the years to add Wi-Fi capability and remote processing capability,” Visker said. “The radio frequency capability and bar codes improve in-transit [visibility] so we can know where the materiel is at each step of the process.”
This affords DLA Distribution’s customers, the military services and other federal agencies, better customer service.
“We’ve got an emergency supply operation center capability — a customer can actually pick up the phone and call and say, ‘I need this immediately, shipped by the fastest traceable means,’” Visker said. “Within a matter of hours, it’s picked, packed and shipped out of the distribution center and on its way.”
Visker pointed to the advances in equipment such as forklifts, mobile carts and barcode scanners.
“Just like you see in the grocery store — the clerk walking around with the handheld barcode reader that’s wireless … we have that handheld remote capability,” he said. “We have remote carts that are a complete computer suites sitting on a mobile cart — operated by automobile batteries so that you can move to the work as opposed to hauling materiel around. It saves steps and makes the process more efficient.”
Before these innovations, there were multiple employees manually moving back and forth from a fixed workstation to the materiel.
When It Has to Be There On Time
A small commercial airfield sits next to DLA Distribution in New Cumberland. Visker provided an example of its use.
“Say the Presidential Air Unit has a part that they need. They’ll send an aircraft up here to New Cumberland to that small commercial field,” he said. “We’ll run the part over to them, so that within a matter of hours, we can fill a high-priority requisition in an emergency.”
Supporting the warfighter is DLA’s primary mission, and large amounts of supplies — sometimes in 10,000-pound increments — need to be transported. Visker said DLA Distribution sometimes does this by using multiple shipments, in contingency operations, and by using what DLA calls “pure pallet” schemes.
“Materiel can be assembled here in a nice, pristine environment on a big 463-liter air pallet that would go in an Air Force aircraft or chartered commercial aircraft, and could be taken all the way to Iraq,” he said. “By improving that process, we shortened the delivery response time from 35 days to 15 days.”
Visker has seen DLA Distribution transform exponentially over almost three decades. From changes in infrastructure and equipment to transportation storage. Included in the storage aspect is something the average DLA employee might not guess is part of DLA Distribution’s mission: Meals, Ready-to-Eat.
“We do have some of the combat rations that we store — MREs — and we do have an assembly operation out in our distribution center in California that does unitized group rations, which are tactical meals,” Visker said.
A unitized group ration is a meal for 50 people put together in a box. The box typically contains an entrée, all the fixings that would go with it, plus fruit or dessert.
“They come in heavy trays that you can heat up and serve,” Visker said. “It’s not five-star restaurant stuff, but it’s primarily used for forward operating bases where they don’t have the luxury of a dining facility operation [that serves] freshly prepared food.”
Visker said the UGRs are for remote locations that have some sophisticated means of heating up food — “as opposed to out in a foxhole, where your access to food is what you were able to carry.”
Rations those WWI soldiers could only dream about out there in the trenches.