Assessing the success of the army HMMWV integrated logistics plan

Abstract

Acquisition costs of Departement of Defense (DoD) weapon systems are of major concern due to their enormous annual expense. In fact, $165B was spent by DoD on acquisition in 2008. However, another budget component, Product Support, costs the government an additional $132B annually. DoD has stated that the preferred method for providing this life-cycle sustainment is Performance Based Logistics (PBL), and 20% of all programs now use that method of support. PBL's goal is to provide maximum readiness at reasonable costs. Unfortunately, evaluation of the success of these PBL contracts is difficult, because of the large number of metrics and vast differences among weapon systems. Several studies have attempted to do so, but they have not used DoD-prescribed metrics for evaluation. This research attempts to use two of the five DoD-prescribed metrics to analyze the PBL contract for the Army High Mobility Medium Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) Integrated Logistics Plan (ILP). These two are Cost Per Unit Usage (CPUU) and Operational Availability. This statistical analysis found that the ILP does not appear to be decreasing cost or increasing Operational Availability for the Army HMMWV program. Further study using the other three DoD metrics is recommended.