Thread by @MidOfficer

Military leaders spend a lot of time talking about vehicle serviceability. What does it take to keep an Army's vehicles ready and available for training and operations - and why is it too late to set readiness targets once you've already purchased a vehicle fleet? A🧵...

Vehicle serviceability is a measure of what portion of a unit's fleet is available for use. Vehicles can either be fully servicable, outstanding but usable with known faults or delayed inspections, or unservicable due to major faults or critical inspections that need to occur.

The factors that impact serviceability are generally the availability of technicians, the availability of spare parts, and the availability of appropriate infrastructure & specialty tooling to conduct maintenance. Without all three required inputs, your fleet is in trouble.

Technician hours seems like a simple problem - just recruit/assign enough techs to each unit, and problem solved, right? Unfortunately never as easy it sounds - despite a decent signing bonus, there is still a shortage of techs, and a number of further complicating factors.

As vehicle complexity increases, so does the training and specialty qualifications that techs need to work on them. A general background in mechanics isn't enough anymore, you often need specific training on each vehicle type, making it harder to efficiently train & deploy techs.

Geographic dispersion hurts here too. Tanks are the 🇨🇦 ⚔️s most complicated fleet but we currently operate them in two locations, requiring the available tank-qualified techs to be split between two bases, reducing efficiencies & flexibility - so we're moving them all West soon.

Big picture, the more different vehicles you have in your fleet, the harder it is to efficiently use technicians because they can't all work on all vehicles, meaning potential labour hours can't always be turned into actual wrench bending. Lesson? Standardize & simplify!

Parts are the next struggle. Techs waiting on parts aren't turning broken vehicles into fighting platforms. Parts are another complicated factor, impacted by your maintenance budget, fleet age & size, industrial relationships, contracting mechanisms, as well as data & analytics.

Every Army would love to stockpile huge quantities of parts, but annual parts funding is an easy & common target for budget cuts. Without stockpiled parts to ship from depot, equipment managers have to order from OEMs, often waiting for a part to not just be shipped but built.

For small fleets of vehicles, it is less likely that major assemblies or rarely replaced parts will be readily available. A good example is the TAPV. 🇨🇦 is the only user, and the total global fleet is only 500, limiting economies of scale in keeping an industrial chain alive.

In comparison, the US JLTV has over 18,500 units in service & growing, ensuring that the supply chain will exist for decades to come. Similarly, as fleets age, it's less likely that parts will remain available as sub-suppliers go out of business & key components end production.

The first lesson here is that bespoke micro-fleets are always a bad idea. Economies of scale are real, and it's a true tragedy that NATO never meaningfully standardized vehicles. For a small army, unique national vehicle fleets can pre-program future serviceability woes.

Lesson 2 is that it's a bad idea to make generational vehicle buys. Buying 500 of a vehicle every 20 years leads to boom & bust cycles for industry and undercuts product support. Better to buy 50-100 in ongoing blocks to keep supply chains alive & allow incremental improvement.

Lesson 3 is a reminder that simpler may be better. Commercial vehicles have huge engineering experience & supply chain advantages over military vehicles - wherever possible we should adapt their core platforms & technology to military use.

https://twitter.com/MidOfficer/status/1625361623794831360?s=20

Maintenance infrastructure is the 3rd pillar. Army techs can do a lot in austere conditions, but true productivity requires safe & well-equipped facilities, lifts, & test & tooling sets. If you don't have enough maint bays to match your desired serviceability you won't get it.

This has been a challenge since the IED arms race has led to ever larger vehicles that often don't fit / can't be lifted/jacked in Cold War era facilities. Procurement does look at infrastructure, but it's hard to buy new buildings on top of vehicles when $ is constrained.

Geographic dispersion challenges infrastructure & specialty tooling too, especially with intensive & unique vehicles like tanks. Serviceability will improve whenever maint-intensive fleets are consolidated to few locations, focusing available $$$ to properly equip 1 or 2 depots.

Alternatively it may be time to re-assess our IED focus and ask whether this is still a core requirement? There is a lot of weight & size being built into today's fleets for IED protection that could instead go into either lighter/smaller fleets OR protection against new threats.

Is it really just these 3 factors that drive serviceability though? I'd argue no - and that the real decisions about serviceability & readiness need to be built into realistic expectations & planning in force design, capability development, and procurement challenges.

The mistake we always make is that we never procure to the desired readiness level, and we just assume that the natural state of a 40+ ton complex military vehicle driven by a 19 year old soldier is to work, when in reality, it is destined to break, and soon.

The two broad approaches to procurement are 1) Procure to Requirement, a rare approach where the specific need is sacrosanct and will be resourced, and 2) Procure to Budget, the common approach where you balance capability & total numbers within the budget you've been given.

Procure to Budget starts with the operational need for a fleet size then make sacrifices to doctrine, adds shared fleets, risks operational stock, etc, to get a good enough platform in good enough numbers. We don't admit it - but this is where serviceability really gets decided.

If you want real readiness, you have to pay for it. If you need 100 vehicles to be ready, you need to account for 30% in preventative maint cycles, then another 20% in corrective maint for specific issues - so 150 - and that's without battle damage or loss stocks being added.

But instead every time we need 100 vehicles to be ready we buy 100, which really means that 70 will be available, so we flog the techs and delay preventative maint until vehicles really break, and then before you know it we're down to 50-60% serviceability and all out of parts.

The point is that in all things you need to price in failure & friction from the outset. Plans fail, people stumble, vehicles break. If you want a fleet that works keep it homogeneous, simple, in few locations - and factor the readiness you want into the fleet size upfront.