“Hero of the Battlefield”
"HERO OF THE BATTLEFIELD"
The Army’s Improved Target Acquisition System (ITAS) has achieved a 100 percent operational readiness rate. ITAS is an all-weather, advanced electro-optic target acquisition fire control system that guides tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided weapons to their targets with surgical precision.
By Marty Kauchak
Operational readiness rates (ORRs) serve a different purpose for each military audience. To some analysts inside the Pentagon E-ring, they are part of a weekly report card on a deployed unit or system. Others inside or outside the Beltway may look to an ORR as a decision point for allocating fewer resources or, when necessary, throwing another life-ring to a floundering program.
Regardless of the audience, interest is generated when an ORR achieves 100 percent and weapons systems perform as designed in combat. Such is the case with the Army’s Improved Target Acquisition System (ITAS). The system has achieved a 100-percent ORR due, in great part, to the program’s logistics program, and the collaborative relationship between the government and the Raytheon industry team.
These successes recently helped ITAS earn a DoD-industry award and accolades from a two-star, service operational commander.
Combat-Hardened
ITAS is an all-weather, day-or-night, advanced electro-optic target acquisition fire control system that guides TOW (tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided) weapons to their targets with surgical precision. The TOW ITAS provides a highly mobile capability for early entry forces to destroy advanced threat armor at greater standoff ranges in the main battle area.
“ITAS was developed because the TOW 2 system it replaces did not have adequate forward-looking infrared (FLIR) or thermal sight capability to see beyond the maximum TOW missile range,” pointed out Dan O’Boyle, service spokesman. Although ITAS was developed as a missile shooter, O’Boyle said it is being used more as a surveillance tool during the current conflict.
The system is deployed with ground forces in Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom, and has been used through all phases of the missions, including the current reconstruction operations. ITAS’ second-generation FLIR sensor allows long-range reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities.
Prime contractor Raytheon Network Centric Systems has delivered about 1,000 ITAS units to the Army. The system has been fielded to 21 of the Army and National Guards’ 48-plus brigades, and six of the seven Stryker brigades. The company has nearly 1,000 more units on order during the next two years with contract options that extend through the fiscal budget out years.
The Marine Corps is also procuring ITAS units.
Contractor and Service Insights
The ITAS contractor logistics support (CLS) team consists of 20 people who provide infrastructure support at the Raytheon Network Centric Systems facility, in McKinney, Texas, and 15 field service representatives (FSRs) assigned worldwide, including at forward repair areas (FRAs) in the Afghanistan and Iraq theater of operations.
“We are totally responsible for the operational readiness of this equipment,” said Mike Campisi, Raytheon’s combat systems program director. Under the existing 10-year, firm-fixed-price contract, the contractor must maintain ITAS at a 90-percent operational readiness rate. “We have internally targeted to make sure that we are at 100 percent,” Campisi said.
A number of vendor-driven initiatives have allowed the CLS team to reach and maintain the 100-percent readiness metric. In addition to having stores of spare parts and rotatable stock in place at critical nodes,
The ITAS FSRs tend to be former military personnel who have completed a rigorous training program from the contractor. “We pick them specifically because they understand our customers, their needs and the urgency of their mission and are able to live in that environment,” said Campisi.
FSRs maintain real-time connectivity with the home team in Texas and area FRAs through the Internet to discuss technical issues and resolve emergent part requirements. When parts fail, “the FSR will for the most part, have a rotatable item, so [the representative] will replace it immediately and send us back the bad one. We’ll send him the good one and they will pass in the air. Then we’ll identify what’s wrong with it, fix and collect data against the bad part, and stay ready for the next rotatable call out,” Campisi explained.
Like other vendors supporting the global war on terrorism, Raytheon developed a logistics process that breaks down the tyranny of distance and time to quickly get ITAS components into the hands of its FSRs and the warfighters in the two theaters.
“We are able to directly ship from the U.S. to both theaters of operation,” remarked Dale Jorgensen, CLS business manager with Raytheon Network Centric Systems. “We have a shipping hub located in both areas that we run. From those points we will sometimes ship commercial in-country or use the Army’s supply route to push the parts to the next operating area.”
Under the terms of the ITAS contract, the CLS team also controls and manages the program’s wholesale and retail parts. If there is a material problem with an ITAS unit, the Army customer will take the item to the FSR to fix the system or supply a part. “We utilize a Web-based tool that allows us to control the inventory and manage the requisitions from our FSRs worldwide,” said Jorgensen.
The ITAS CLS logistics system is refined through on-going analysis and data collection efforts. “We are able to constantly do an analysis that tells us which parts we should have forward-deployed and in what quantities to be ready for any type of failure or damage,” Jorgensen said.
The ITAS effort is part of a broader, evolving performance-based or predictive logistics initiative that, in part, literally determines what system or sub-system component is going to break next.
The ITAS CLS concept for achieving and maintaining high ORRs “has proven to be a very effective method of support for all the ITAS units regardless of their mission or location,” said the Army’s O’Boyle. “Proper supply chain management, through supplier and customer relationship management and distribution management, allows us to have good control over the acquisition and distribution of items to ensure the timely and efficient support for our war fighters. Good distribution management has permitted the support of units without an overabundance of spare parts.” Hoping to take advantage of these successes, the Marines will use the same logistics support contract and concept as part of their ITAS acquisition strategy.
Logistics Success
Asked to supply one material improvement that could be attributed to the ITAS CLS initiative, the team said that it bolstered the reliability of the ITAS’s right-hand grip. Over a period of time, FSRs reported the grip’s switch was torn, the hand grip was broken-off and the sub-component had other shortfalls. So, instead of ordering a number of replacement grips, the CLS team examined how to permanently fix the problem.
The engineers looked at all the data and proposed to the Army that a bar be placed on the grip to enhance ruggedness and reliability. “We added the bar. On any unit that has the bar we have only seen a few failures—mostly as a result of dropping the system. So, we saw the failure rate go from about 60 a year down to about zero. That is the kind of flow-back that we are getting from the FSRs,” said Campisi.
Accolades on Paper
The Secretary of Defense Performance Based Logistics (PBL) Award is under the administrative oversight of Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. In a memo Krieg put out earlier this year, PBL was described as the DoD strategy to improve weapon system readiness by purchasing weapon system sustainment as an integrated package. “This is based on output measures, such as weapon system availability, rather than input measures, such as parts and technical services,” the memo reads.
The Army-Raytheon ITAS team received the 2007 SecDef PBL (sub-system level) Award, one of three award categories, in recognition of dramatically improving the mission success of the ITAS through innovative performance based logistics. In particular, the ITAS CLS was cited for achieving an average ORR of 99.7 percent for the Army’s 782 ITAS units. That performance along with improved repair times resulted in the service achieving nearly $300 million in cost savings.
“What we attribute this to, in addition to the tremendous skill, ability and adaptability of the field service representatives working with the equipment, is the lay-in stock—having the ability to see what the needs are, what has occurred with that product. In addition, all that analysis and all that failure information that flow back into us is what we used to make product improvement,” Campisi said.
This was the only Army award. “For us, it was also an underline—it heavily motivated us with all of the different ideas we had for both our customer and ourselves. We asked: ‘Ok, we are here so how do we make this better? Where do we go from here? And how do we get it out there so if the user even thinks there is a problem we have it fixed immediately?’” recalled Campisi. He also credited the close professional relationship between the Army and industry team—which often talks about program issues several times a day—as contributing to the award. “This is a partnership process throughout the acquisition authority. It was a very big deal for the team,” he said. ITAS has also been recognized for its effectiveness in combat.
Battlefield Successes
The warfighter wants to see a munition land on-time, on-target, and with the maximum lethal impact, when he or she pushes a button or squeezes a trigger. The ITAS CLS-service team does too and has helped to meet this litmus test, according to an Army-provided statement attributed to then Major General David Petraeus during his command assignment of the 101st Airborne Division.
“The FLIR and the TOW ITAS, in particular, was the hero of the battlefield,” Petraeus said. “It enabled us to see the enemy way, way out before he could even believe we could see him. And that night outside the airfield, for example, our TOW gunners could see the enemy and bring in either close air support or artillery before the enemy even realized he was being seen.” ♦