HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – As the Army has been taking new technology to the field for on-the-fly feedback and upgrades, the sustainment community has been taking lessons and thinking about the kind of technology they’ll need to equip and fuel formations in the future.
It’s going to require a lot less diesel fuel, leaders said Wednesday at the AUSA Global Force Symposium here. The infantry squad vehicle, one of the stars of the Transformation in Contact effort, sips fuel compared to the Humvee, its “college-kid-on-Spring-Break” predecessor, according to the 25th Infantry Division’s sustainment brigade commander.
“To give you kind of a touch point in that, our Alpha Company only had to push into 2,700 gallons of gas through the entire duration of that formation, in that fight, because of a low consumption rate with the ISV,” said Col. Chris Johnson.
That was compared to 45,000 gallons burned by 1980s-era Humvees the year before, Johnson said.
“You’re like, well, what’s the big deal in having to push less gas?” he said. “Well, we look at our fight through a lens of fighting in the Pacific. We look at it through a lens of fighting, maybe, places like the Philippines, some other islands that, you know, we won’t mention here.”
Lower fuel consumption means that many fewer fuel trucks, driven by soldiers, on the roads in congested cities or on highways with low bridges and overpasses, he said.
Elsewhere, sustainers are leaning on power banks to shorten the time they have to run generators, not only reducing fuel consumption but the amount of noise a tactical operations center makes.
Using Solar Stik, Johnson said, the formation was able to stop running their generators around the clock. Instead, they ran them for six hours a day to charge a battery, which powered the ops center for the rest of the time.
“Now I’m quiet, I’m smaller,” he said. “I can take my TOC down and divide it into a couple different formations, which increases my survivability. I don’t have a targetable footprint on the ground.”
Autonomous sustainment
The next frontier will be figuring out how to integrate unmanned systems, according to the head of Combined Arms Support Command.
Right now, sustainers can get fuel or ammo to a battlefield unit by dropping a supply robot, said Maj. Gen. Michelle Donahue. But if they want to recover and reuse the robot, they have to send a person to go get it. The ability to control the robot at longer ranges might change that.
Or, Donahue mused, could sustainers eventually dispatch manufacturing capabilities to make vehicle parts or even food?
“I mean, if we could be sustainers that basically eliminated our jobs on the battlefield – I’d be okay with that, if you enabled those warfighters to be able to sustain and drive their own readiness,” she said.
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