Q&A: Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury
Written by Jeff McKaughan
MLF 2009 Volume: 3 Issue: 9 (October)
Deputy Commanding General
U.S. Army Materiel Command
Pillsbury graduated from Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, with a bachelor’s degree in history. He also holds a master’s degree in international relations from Troy State University. His military education includes the Infantry Officer Basic Course, Transportation Officer Advanced Course, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, and the U.S. Army War College.
Prior to his current assignment, he served as AMC’s deputy chief of staff for logistics and operations, G-3, from July 2007 to October 2008 and as the commander of the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command from December 2003 to July 2007.
He has served in a variety of command and staff assignments. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in May 1973 and began his military career as a mortar platoon leader and later support platoon leader, with the 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division, Fort Lewis, Wash. Early in his career, he served as a platoon leader, detachment commander, and company executive officer and commander.
From 1991-1993, he served as commander, 8th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.; from 1993-1994 he served as executive officer, force development, Aviation Division, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans, U.S. Army, Washington, D.C.; and from 1995- 1997 he served as commander, Division Support Command, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell. Pillsbury also served as assistant division commander (Support), 10th Mountain Division (Light), Fort Drum, N.Y., from 1997-1998.
His joint assignments include chief, Sustainability, Mobilization Plans and Exercises Division, J-4, from 1998-1999; deputy director, logistics, readiness and requirements, J-4, from 1999-2000; and finally as commander of the Defense Distribution Center, Defense Logistics Agency, New Cumberland, Pa., from 2000 to 2002. From 2002 to October 2003, he was assigned as deputy chief of staff, G-4, U.S. Army Europe and Seventh Army, Germany.
His awards and decorations include the Army Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal (with Oak Leaf Cluster), Legion of Merit (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal (with two Oak Leaf Clusters), Joint Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal (with 2 Oak Leaf Clusters), Army Achievement Medal, Joint Meritorious Unit Award (with three Oak Leaf Clusters), National Defense Service Medal (with two Bronze Stars), and the Parachutist, Senior Army Aviator, Air Assault, Joint Chiefs of Staff Identification, and Army Staff Identification badges.
Pillsbury was interviewed by MLF Editor Jeff McKaughan.
Q: Does the AMC from a year ago look the same as it does today as far as organizational structure and size? Do you expect any significant growth in the coming years?
A: AMC is transforming, as is the entire Army and the Department of Defense. There are several big differences between AMC a year ago and today.
One is the Army Contracting Command, with its two subordinate commands: the Expeditionary Contracting Command and the Mission and Installation Contracting Command.
The Mission and Installation Contracting Command are those folks who do the contracting work at posts, camps and stations worldwide, and the Expeditionary Contracting Command folks deploy to support contingency operations. The executive director of the Army Contracting Command, Mr. Jeff Parsons—an SES [Senior Executive Service] two-star—is standing up this organization that will go fully operational-capable October 1. And we are really looking forward to that.
Another change is the solidification of the AFSBs [Army Field Support Brigades] and their subordinate battalions worldwide. These have become locked in concrete, if you will, based on concepts and plans approved by the department. Ten of the logistics support elements that were in our posts, camps and stations have been transformed into battalions that can and do deploy with their division headquarters.
We have developed a partnership with the ASA(ALT) [assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology] community to form the Materiel Enterprise in support of the chief’s vision of four cores enterprises within the Army. General [Ann] Dunwoody and Mr. [Dean] Popps are leading the Materiel Enterprise. This fundamentally changes the way we do business in that we are no longer doing parallel actions with ASA(ALT) but are fully integrated throughout the life cycle of all the materiel—which is one of the those palm-to-forehead things we should have been doing for a long time. This has allowed us to get better and faster and, in the future, at less cost. The warfighter wants it better, faster, cheaper, and we always have two of the three. Better and faster, but at what cost? Both General Dunwoody and Mr. Popps have tasked their staffs to get that third one—the cost—down. So, fundamentally, AMC has changed and will continue to change.
Where will we be 12 months from now? We will have conducted the drawdown from Iraq. If it goes as planned, with General [Raymond] Odierno calling the shots over there in theater, we will have brought back thousands upon thousands of pieces of rolling stock, tracks, containers, and we will be in the midst of resetting the Army. The chief of staff of the Army has given General Dunwoody the mission to be the agent for the reset of the equipment, and we will be in full throes with that.
I would say that our organizational structure will look fairly similar to the way it looks now with the Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command, the Army Field Support Command, and the Army Contracting Command as our face to the field. Our life cycle management commands behind them provide functional and multifunctional support to the equipping part of our Army.
Lastly, and in one way different from today, we will continue BRAC. This will change where AMC functions, not necessarily how it functions.
Q: You mentioned the drawdown and resetting the equipment. Whose role is it to decide what equipment is brought out, what is distributed within the theater and what is left behind?
A: It’s a team sport. The Materiel Enterprise, which consists of stakeholders outside of AMC, includes the Army G8, the Army G3, the Army G4—and certainly a partner in this effort is DLA. Once the equipment has been declared not needed by either ARCENT in theater or CENTCOM in theater—and the Department of the Army determines it can then come off shore if you will—then the Materiel Enterprise will determine what comes back, how, if it gets repaired, if it is provided for FMS [foreign military sales] or if it is disposed of.
As you can imagine, this is a massive undertaking.
Q: You touched on BRAC a few minutes ago, but I’d like to go back there and get your take on AMC’s status in its execution of BRAC.
A: When General Griffin was in command and BRAC 2005 results were announced, he started a process with our executive deputy to the commanding general, Ms. Kathryn Condon, a three-star SES equivalent who is in charge of BRAC. When General Dunwoody assumed command from General Griffin, she continued to provide the steady hand at the helm with Ms. Condon leading AMC’s BRAC efforts.
AMC’s BRAC impacts 27 commands or activities across 24 states and affects over 10,000 employees. Ms. Condon and her team have done a tremendous job and are ahead of schedule.
The big muscle movements are the CECOM Life Cycle Management Command moving down from Fort Monmouth, N.J., to Aberdeen Proving Ground. Md., and its associated tenants—a couple of PEOs and the Communications-Electronics Research Development and Engineering Center [CERDEC]—into a most impressive campus at Aberdeen. This move is right on pace. There are currently permanent party folks from all of the Monmouth organizations at Aberdeen right now.
The second big move will be the headquarters from Fort Belvoir, Va., to Redstone Arsenal, Ala., along with the United States Army Security Assistance Command [USASAC]. That move will consist of about 1,700 spaces. There are 290-plus AMC folks at Redstone right now. The USASAC actually unfurled its colors at Redstone Arsenal on September 11, becoming the first headquarters to officially move. So as you can see, USASAC is well ahead of the mandated completion date of September 15, 2011.
The third major muscle movement will be the TACOM Life Cycle Management Command component from Rock Island Arsenal, Ill., up to Detroit Arsenal in Warren, Mich. The construction of their building is well on its way—ahead of schedule. They too have permanent party folks on site in Detroit. Through Ms. Condon’s drive and leadership, this has been a real success story.
Q: How did the overall AMC budget fair in fiscal year 2010 when compared against your funding in FY08/09? Any expectations of your funding out beyond FY10?
A: Interesting question in that it has to be taken in bites. The first one is the base in which we faired a little lower in FY10 than we did in FY09—about 9 percent lower I believe.
However, before we start wringing our hands we are waiting for the OCO [overseas contingency operations] supplement to come through, and we believe that that will offset the loss in our base funding. We are certainly anticipating the supplemental to be able to cover the reset for our equipment. Congress has been very good at providing resources in the past.
The question about the future is up in the air as we have not pursued an FYDP [future years defense program] as the department is waiting for the QDR results.
Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have been very supportive of the military in relation to requesting OCO dollars in support and Congress funding those dollars.
Q: Regarding the OCO dollars, do those dollars come in to you assigned for a specific budget line like RDT&E, procurement or O&M?
A: Mostly the money goes into fixing the equipment that we’ve been using at such a high OPTEMPO.
Q: Contracting is obviously an important aspect of AMC’s work. What are you doing to ensure you are agile and responsive enough from a contracting perspective to meet the needs of an expeditionary warfighter? Additionally, what are the cornerstones of being responsive yet still being transparent and fiscally responsible?
A: There have been several studies, several panels that have looked at this; from a congressional and department viewpoint, the Gansler Commission on Wartime Contracting and the Army Contracting Task Force provided the momentum to reform the Army contracting enterprise.
Obviously the department had allowed contracting to atrophy. It was recognized through the Gansler Report that General Griffin then, and General Dunwoody now, have driven the train to stand up the Army Contracting Command I mentioned earlier. We are increasing the contracting work force, adding 617 military and 1,191 civilian contracting personnel over the next three years. And 470 more positions are identified in concept plans still being staffed. It will take some time to grow that expertise, but nevertheless, you have to start somewhere, and there is plenty of good young talent out there. The American work force is out there looking for opportunities within the federal government.
We are also taking a look within our formations at how we train our contracting officer representatives [COR]. A COR is a staff sergeant, sergeant first class, warrant officer, and in some cases an officer, who falls in on a forward operating base or camp where there is a contract in place to perform a service—be it food, laundry, custodial services, etc.—it is that COR’s responsibility to ensure that that contract is done within the letter and spirit of the written word.
We have not done a good job in the past of training those CORs. Mr. Parsons’ MICC [Mission and Installation Contracting Command] and the Expeditionary Contracting Command offices worldwide are focusing on training those young men and women who will become CORs. And we are already seeing a much better return on the services that we are buying because we are having better trained folks putting their eyeballs on the contractor. So we are taking this business of contracting very serious from those service-related contracts all the way up to the hundreds of millions of dollars of purchasing we are doing at our life cycle management command acquisition centers— Apaches, Bradleys, etc. We are putting the focus on the entire gamut of contracting.
Q: Let’s talk about contractors a little more. What’s the general breakdown of AMC’s use of military employees versus outside contractors, and has AMC started the process of bringing more of the formerly outside contractor services inside?
A: The process has started. We are taking a look, for example, at AMC headquarters. We have several contractors that are sitting side-by-side with our employees providing that very necessary assistance at a certain time, for a surge project a variety of topics at a variety of times.
However, if we see a contractor sitting there performing the same mission for two, three, four, five years, then perhaps it’s time to take a look at bringing that capability in house. And that’s what we’re doing, but we are doing it very judiciously, and we’re not taking a salami slice or a machete where a surgical tool is required.
But, at the end of the day our costs have gone up for contractors doing the same amount of work, so we are trying to make good business decisions to bring those contractor man-year equivalents into federal service.
Something to also note is that in many cases we are getting that same person coming in so we are not losing that experience and talent.
Q: The majority of the life cycle management commands of AMC report directly to you. Are you satisfied that life cycle management techniques and processes are fully integrated throughout AMC? Is there a basic formula for LCM that can be applied across the board to new equipment and systems as well as currently in-service items?
A: This question goes right to the heart of what General Dunwoody and Mr. Popps are trying to do with this Materiel Enterprise. We have four life cycle management commands—TACOM LCMC that is responsible for everything that touches and causes friction with the ground and shoots; CECOM LCMC, those smart people that do all of the communications for us; the Aviation and Missile LCMC; and then our Joint Munitions and Lethality LCMC, the conventional ammunition folks.
At those four sites, it is a marriage between the ASA(ALT) and the AMC family that brings together the synergies that we talked about earlier. Who better than the program manager to know the heart, lungs and liver of the program? Who better than the AMC sustainers to help sustain those hearts, lungs and livers? And, then who better than the military sales folks to know what to do with that when it comes to the end of an item’s useful life with the U.S. Army?
So the philosophy at these LCMCs is to marry all of the skill sets together around the PM and let that organization do life cycle management from cradle to grave.
The culture between the two large organizations that form the Materiel Enterprise is different. There is a culture within the ASA(ALT) community that—for all the right reasons—trains their folks on cost, schedule and performance. Those are the metrics that they are measured by at the end of the day. The metric that the Army Materiel Command folks are measured against is readiness for our Army. Different sets of metrics, different sets of skills, so you can see that when we put them together how powerful that would be across the life cycle of the product.
As an example, the product manager for utility helicopters at Redstone Arsenal has the UH-60 helicopter. The UH-60 has several models—U, L, M and then the special ops variant. The alpha mode, obviously the first one off the production line, is in decline, and we are taking “As” and turning them into “Ls.” We are taking As and selling them to foreign military customers. The L, the Lima model, is the predominant model of our fleet of the 1,600 or so Black Hawks, and yet the Mike model is in production now to cascade and take the L model’s place in the out-years.
So you can see the entire gamut from production to resale in that one program office. You can see the skill sets required to manage that total operation and [that it] varies more than ASA(ALT), more than AMC alone. Together, however, we can do a good job of managing that program.
Q: From a culture point of view, how difficult is it to out the groups of people and their metrics together under the same roof?
A: It is difficult. Cost, schedule and performance are only part of it. Readiness is only part of it. And I even left out the Research, Development and Engineering Command aspect of the process and, for example, what they provide to help the Alpha model to improve, the Lima model be improved and sustain the Mike model.
When I was the commander of Aviation and Missile Command back in 2003 when we started this LCMC thing, it was definitely a couple of different groups coming together storming and norming. But I can tell you that the work that General Dunwoody and Mr. Popps are doing, following the lead of the Army chief of staff and the secretary of the Army, has brought this LCMC concept miles. We brought it hundreds of yards along before, and in the last six to eight months they have brought it miles.
Q: Are there any tangible examples of AMC’s implementation of Lean Six Sigma?
A: I can discuss statistics, but I would rather tell you about a recent visit I just had to Red River Army Depot this week. About 10 years ago, then Colonel Jim Dwyer commanded Red River. He’s now an SES and accompanied me on the trip. When we went into the HMMWV line he told me that they were pulling five to 10 vehicles a week from that line, and he said they thought that was great. I watched for about a half-hour on that same line, and I was able to watch two 16-minute cycles, and every 16 minutes the HMMWV moved along the process—every 16 minutes a completed HMMWV rolled off the line. Thirty-two HMMWVs a day roll off that line.
Now, what is the line? The line is a pulse every 16 minutes so each station has 16 minutes to perform their ascribed task. There were perhaps 12 stations, but it’s not just reset that has a scope of work— it’s also recap. So we have two different funding streams going on the same line with the same mechanic and he or she—fully 20 percent of the work force is female—knew what to do on that HMMWV, either reset or recap. Every 32 minutes a brand spanking new HMMWV with zero miles rolls off the line. That’s incredible!
Jim Dwyer was awestruck and could not believe what he was seeing. But what does that tell us? Well, first it tells you that we have taken the Toyota model, the lean model, and incorporated it into the industry base of the United States Army. Now that’s not necessarily news. We’ve won 23 Shingo Awards—and that’s tangible—but we have taken all of this and gone into another route that you didn’t ask about, and that is ISO compliance. We now have the same ISO compliance as companies such as Caterpillar, Oshkosh, Sikorsky and Boeing at our Army depots.
If you go down to Corpus Christi Army Depot, Texas—remember I mentioned the A model Black Hawk being transformed in an L model as part of recap—it used to be that we would push out five to 10 Blackhawks a year. We did 32 three years ago. We can now do as many as the resources are provided to us. We are not constrained by the number of our mechanics or our processes.
So this lean culture has turned into statistics, but more than that it has turned into a mindset that our work force has adopted—not embraced. It’s not a top down thing; it’s bottom up. If we don’t have buy-in from the union, from the work force, it’s going to fail.
Q: If you’re able to do reset and recap on the same line at the same time, then that has to provide synergies in terms of effort and cost.
A: Two years ago, Letterkenny Army Depot, which also has an HMMWV line that is every bit as good as Red River’s, produced 27 HMMWVs a month for free. Free here means that they were able to take the dollars that the PM gave them to do 100 HMMWVs, and we were able to do those 100 vehicles plus an additional 27 for those same dollars.
Q: From AMC’s point of view, how successful and/or effective is the current state of the art in RFID and UID technologies in real-world applications that serve the supply system from fort to foxhole?
A: They are not where we would like them yet. RFI a lot more than UID. We track more than 35,000 movements in the Pacific and in Europe using RFI. We have tremendous visibility on movements in Iraq. As part of the drawdown we are going to be able to see each one of your containers as it comes out and each one of our end items as it rolls south.
To that end, our transporters have much better visibility on what’s coming and what’s going. UID is another thing. The reason for this is that RFI is relatively inexpensive. For the most part, the technologies, the satellites, a couple of stations at key points, attached a $5 tag onto a container, and you have a pretty good tracking system.
We’re being tasked by OSD to tag every end item and every component that costs more than $5,000. As you might imagine that’s a lot. I was down at Fort Bragg last week and saw a SARET [small arms readiness and evaluation team] where the artisans from Anniston Army Depot, who are our weapons experts, go down to arms room up to depot-level repair of weapons that have just come back. We are basically resetting their unit in their arms room. As I was watching this operation at a special ops unit—which is huge all by itself because they are a demanding customer—I watched three young men take UID tags and mark weapons with them. Now, what will that do for us in the future? Well, we will now be able to seriously follow the life cycle of that weapon. We will know its condition, be able to identify its configuration by just scanning that bar code.
What we will be able to do with the engine on a Black Hawk will be to seriously be able to get into the life cycle of that engine. We will know, based on scanning that UID on that T701D engine and know how many hours, configuration and be able to tell how it’s performed and why it has performed against other engines in the fleet.
The big question is when, and right now the answer honestly is I don’t know. We’re about 10 percent, I would guess, through marking our parts, and the data is flowing back into our logistics information warehouse down at Huntsville, Ala. Our engineers are just now starting to wade through that massive amount of data. Without a doubt, this is a work in progress—a necessary work in progress, but come and see my replacement 10 years from now and I think you will see what the power of UID can deliver.
Q: Certain individual manufacturing skills could be considered perishable. Does the military have a responsibility—if not a vested interest—in working with select industries to preserve those skills and keeping alive in the U.S. industrial base?
A: That’s a great question, and I appreciate you asking me this. This is a tough question and one that we are dealing with. It is a real success story of AMC and the Army in particular.
The resources that our Congress has provided—that I mentioned earlier—that the department has flowed down to AMC, and that we have flowed down to our industrial operations, has ensured that for the short term we are in great shape skill set-wise throughout our industrial base operation.
Couple that with the ability to get ISO-compliant; now our depots can take in civilian work when it does not impact our primary military mission. We are not doing this now, but we will be able to do so when the shooting stops and our workflow decreases. We will be able to partner with Caterpillar for example. In fact the Caterpillar engine that goes into Army equipment is being fixed by Red River employees certified by Caterpillar. We are basically a sub to Caterpillar.
The quick answer is that we have done a great job with our blue collar industrial capability. Another example is that all five of our hard iron depots—Corpus Christi, Red River, Anniston, Tobyhanna and Letterkenny—have a partnership with local high schools and in some cases two-year technical colleges. We bring in students from these institutions and give them skills such as welding. We provide them training and job placement when they graduate. So we are working to bring in new blood while our more experienced work force is retiring.
The second thing we are doing is partnering with industry. Industry is bringing their expertise inside our fence, and we are providing them with a brick-and-mortar location. They are doing work side-by-side with our employees so they both are learning skills through the operations. Letterkenny is a great example of this with Raytheon.
Our industrial operations are going very well. Our white collar work force is a little different. What will the Army Contracting Command need for skill sets in 2015 that we don’t know about today? That’s a question we don’t know the answer to but are working to find the solutions. The Defense Acquisition University is re-looking at its curriculum all the time to stay ahead of the requirement for white collar employees. One of the things that General Dunwoody, Ms. Condon and our G1 folks are doing is providing various leadership training for our civilians. The military gives wonderful leadership training from the day a rank is pinned on from lieutenant on up; gives positions of leadership immediately; and provides continuous leadership training.
Civilians don’t. They just are not provided that flow of leadership training throughout their career. The leadership here at AMC has recognized this and is taking steps to fix that. So throughout our work force from the welder to the three-star civilian, we’re trying to look at what skill sets we need for the civilian work force and trying to match the training to meet those needs.
Q: Any final thoughts?
A: The Army Materiel Command is a great place to work. We are transforming, it’s changing, it’s doing all the great things the other commands are doing, but at the end of the day, General Cody said it best when he said, you can’t measure the importance of the warfighter by the proximity to the shooting.
Supporting our warfighters is a team sport, and AMC is a heck of a team player. I am really proud to be a part of it. ♦