Eastern Europe, Africa, changing requirements in Western Europe, and continuing support to DLA Central and CENTCOM have not been isolated developments, but have proven to be interwoven in terms of both problems and solutions.

“Trying to support our expansion in Africa, just the size and [lack of] transportation networks are a challenge. The positive thing with Europe is proven partnerships with NATO and coalition partners, enabling us to establish infrastructure that has helped us as we move into Africa and Eastern Europe,” Ladner said.

“Meanwhile, the war in Southwest Asia has caused some challenges in terms of delivering our support over greater distances and multiple borders and customs requirements – and managing our customers’ expectations – as they deploy and redeploy, they have certain expectations of the support they want and services they need, so we are constantly modifying and enhancing our capabilities to meet those.”

While he expects the eventual drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan – and, presumably, the demand for DLA services – combined with continued fiscal constraints, to lead to a reduction in DLA-E/A personnel and operations in support of CENTCOM, Ladner also believes a growing involvement in Africa will help balance things out across the command. Even so, he added, “The challenge will be continuing the same level of support to our customers as we downsize and restructure.

“This command continues to serve as DLA’s single interface and focal point for EUCOM and AFRICOM [and] I see us expanding our support into Africa as AFRICOM expands there. Barring any other contingency operations that require our support outside our region, we will be able to better focus our operations in the future, especially in Africa,” Ladner said. “We work with a lot of local prime vendors and there is an opportunity to expand distribution efforts in Africa with DLA warehouses, although that is still in the planning stage.”

The transition from Cold War Europe to trans-regional combat theater support to an expanded – and expanding – presence in Eastern Europe and Africa is representative of DLA’s overall mission, through its three regional commands, to provide warfighter-focused, globally responsive, and fiscally responsible supply chain management.

 

DLA Central

Officially, all three regional commands were created at the same time. However, while the other two grew from operations that even predated DLA and the Defense Supply Agency (DSA), the ancestry of DLA Central basically only goes back to the first Gulf War. But that is not all that sets it apart.

“Central evolved as an LNO embedded with the CENTCOM staff; we still have people embedded, but the original LNO is now my deputy,” regional commander Col. Mike Bird explained. “When the OPSTEMPO grew [in Southwest Asia], DLA Central was born.

“CENTCOM itself began as a small command – the only one not located in its geographic AOR – but after 9/11 it grew and the LNO quickly qualified to become a regional command. DLA also was evolving at that time, becoming more warfighter-focused with embedded DLA Contingency Support Teams. With the war, they were no longer ‘contingency,’ so today those are called DLA Support Teams [DSTs].”

DLA Central’s first forward presence was in Kuwait, then DSTs moved into Iraq. Today it maintains three depots in CENTCOM’s AOR – Kuwait, Bahrain, and Kandahar – and eight disposition centers – three in Afghanistan, one in Kuwait, and four in Iraq – all working directly with local warfighters and commanders.

“The willingness of DLA to be more engaged in the operational and tactical sense as the OPSTEMPO grew has resulted in our personnel working side by side with the warfighters in the combat zone, doing a range of functions spanning the entire DLA enterprise,” Bird added. “All the headquarters are joint and coalition, so the DSTs are not focused on a specific service relationship. However, if there is a service-specific issue, they can interface directly with that service component.

“We’re the face to the customer, interfacing directly through the DSTs or DLA Central Headquarters, and with the DSTs making sure headquarters sees the big picture. We also have the ability to go hot-line directly to the commanders of organizations, with DST commanders – who are 0-6s [colonels] from the four services – able to deal directly with DLA distribution centers. And we have our WSRs, who are a bit more technical and broadly trained compared to an LNO, who is more a jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none type.”

The DSTs are organizations with a commander and a lot of capability; an LNO, by comparison, is an individual embedded with a unit, acting as a force multiplier. The difference between an LNO and WSR is the latter can provide technical advice on how to order a part and troubleshoot areas within the supply chain, where an LNO generally does less analysis and more often passes information to others who can do the job.