Sunday, March 6, 2016

Deferred Maintenance Could Swamp Budgets

Almost everyone is familiar with the old saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." It is one of those universal and enduring truths that millions of us implicitly recognize when we have an annual physical exam, take our car to your regular service or repair the roof of our house after some tiles fall after a storm.

But for a multitude of reasons - none of them convincing or persuasive - they do not practice this simple and logical concept in the management of our defense infrastructure.

A report was published recently shows that when it comes to installation and management of infrastructure, the Air Force had to accept a strategy of "patch and repair" for many installations operating worldwide. Qu 'you mean?

In essence, this means that the Air Force can not apply preventive procedures for facilities and key infrastructure. instead, it is deferring necessary and predicted maintenance and repairs up 'that things will actually break or otherwise can not be used.

Why the Air Force has taken this approach? I can assure you it is not because their leaders are unfamiliar with the concept of planned, preventive maintenance and repairs. And it's not because they are unfamiliar with concepts such as performance-based logistics and expected rate of failure.

It is simply because they have the necessary funds to carry out a preferred alternative approach. The result was an excess of costs incurred for repairs and decreased availability awaiting them.

Some examples were recently reported in the media of defense. A Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, an apartment building collapsed forcing the closure of six months for the repair of large nuclear components. In Tinker AFB, Oklahoma, obsolete electrical substation exploded cut the supply reservoir of many buildings and causing millions of dollars in repairs and lost productivity. In that case, "lost productivity" is a sweet to describe the "lost operational capacity" manner.

In simple terms, although the Air Force has received all the money requested in the fiscal 2016 budget for the maintenance of infrastructure and equipment, it has not had a proper allocation topline.

As a group, the military services have asked only about 80 percent of the funds they really need to carry out the necessary maintenance and infrastructure maintenance. This means that about 20 percent of the required maintenance is deferred, the creation of two interrelated issues.

First, these reports have a cumulative effect, ie, the potential costs to repair, upgrade or replacement will be much more costly than the problem had been addressed in a systematic programming.

Second, cumulative effect this ultimately means that a huge portfolio account grows through the entire inventory. For the Air Force, this delay, according to some estimates, has now reached $ 23 billion, a near 20 percent figure for the core budget of the Air Force and approach the size of its annual procurement budget . For the military, there are more than 5000 orders work facilities are not satisfied due to insufficient funds.

A report by the Government Accountability Office in July 2015, "Upgrading facilities: DoD guidance and process reflect best practices for capital planning," he took a deep dive into how these projects are financed. The department maintains a global real estate portfolio of more than 561,000 facilities valued at more than $ 879 million, according to the report. Having an idea of ​​what maintenance is necessary to cover a lot of titles has been a problem for budget planners.

The office of the secretary of defense seems to have little visibility on the needs of the services. The Army, Air Force and Navy have their own methods and schedules to assess the state of facilities which translates "in the state of installation index data that lacked credibility as a measure of quality facilities Department of Defense "said the report.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics issued a memorandum in September 2013 the direction of the adoption of a standard for assessing the status of each facility by the Department of Defense September 2018 process.

And the lack of funds is the undisputed source of the problem. To address current challenges and to finance the existing force, the armed forces some expenses such as staff costs, payment of health care financing and the increased costs of ongoing operations face.

If the delay in maintenance and basic maintenance grows, and other reports to be unacceptable because of the implications of preparation, this inevitably means that funds accounts modernization diverted - acquisition, research and development - which are the only "discretionary" accounts did military service. This creates a real dilemma: the most expensive deferred maintenance in the embezzlement.

What this means in reality is that the ability of future strength will be diminished because we have a lot of resources on the intensity of current and recent past.

And the culprit here is clear: a top line in the inadequate defense that has been removed by hijacking and other resource constraints imposed by the last four years budgetary arrangements.

This has to stop. Simply beat - across the country and in the government - with the reality that we can not continue asking our military to be more places, to take on more projects and assume greater risks while their budgets are either flat or moving in the opposite direction.

If the facilities are not required funds to participate, then Congress should authorize a new round of realignment and closure so that the infrastructure can be adequately fund is eliminated.

Depriving facilities accounts, and inviting a delay in maintaining increasingly become more expensive to treat two terms in Congress from now is very shortsighted and counterproductive. Many have spoken in the past of a growing gap between the military and missions.

This particular area may be the most pernicious example. Not only limits the ability of a domain, but their cumulative impact will inevitably limits the ability in others.

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