Implementing readiness based sparing in the United States Marine Corps by analyzing the United States Army's implementation process

Abstract

In 1985, the Secretary of Defense directed the services to adopt a weapons management inventory concept that allows readiness and cost to be incorporated into setting inventory levels. The plan is laid out in the Department of Defense's Secondary Item weapon Systems Management Concept. The key concept is increasing weapon system readiness at lower costs. Today, this weapons system management concept is known as Readiness Based Sparing (RBS) and has been implemented in all of the services with the exception of the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps has started to progress toward RBS by chartering studies by the Center for Naval Analysis including a review of RBS requirements and the situation of the present state of logistics systems and data collection. CNA's conclusions suggest a difficult road in implementing RBS due to inaccurate data collection. It is recommended that the Marine Corps examine the Army's implementation process due to weapon system commonality and problems encountered in implementing RBS and develop their own implementation plan spearhead by Precision Logistics. Once RBS is established as the inventory management model, the Marine Corps will realize sufficient cost savings and increase in weapon systems readiness.