AMCOM – Aviation and Missiles

From its predecessor organizations in World War II, the history of AMCOM followed separate paths of development for aviation and missiles for some 45 years.

“When AMC stood up in 1962, it was responsible for everything we [the Army Missile Command] did, including acquisition and sustainment, so the command here [Redstone Arsenal] was structured a good deal differently then,” according to Keith Roberson, executive director of AMCOM’s Integrated Materiel Management Center (IMMC). “We were responsible for all missile systems R&D, production, procurement and sustainment until the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1987, which changed the landscape considerably.

“After that, all R&D and acquisition switched over to the Army Assistant Secretary for Acquisition and Logistics. That also was when the PM system was created, with all missile PMs reporting to the MICOM commander.”

The period from the 1958 launch of Sputnik I through the creation of AMC in 1962 saw a flurry of activity in Huntsville, with the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) joining the Army Rocket & Guided Missile Agency (ARGMA), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) as subordinate elements of the Army Ordnance Missile Command (AOMC) at Redstone.

Only a few months later, JPL was transferred to the newly created NASA; in mid-1960, all space-related missions at AOMC/ABMA were turned over to NASA’s new Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. WSMR transferred to the Chief of Ordnance in 1962.

In 1977, MICOM was split in two, creating the Missile Materiel Readiness Command (MIRCOM) and the Missile R&D Command (MIRADCOM). Two years later, AMC reversed itself, rejoining the two as MICOM.

Meanwhile, similar realignments were underway with respect to all Army fixed wing and rotary aircraft, beginning with creation of the Transportation Corps Army Aviation Field Service Office, under the Army Chief of Transportation, in October 1952. Three years later, the Transportation Materiel Command (Marietta, Pa.) brought its logistical responsibility for rail and marine equipment to St. Louis, where it was consolidated with TCAAFSO to form the Transportation Supply and Maintenance Command. In 1959, TSMC was redesignated as the Army Transportation Materiel Command (TMC).

The next phase for both began with the official creation of MICOM, which went operational at the same time as AMC, in August 1962, and the placement of TMC under the Army Mobility Command (MOCOM) as an AMC major subordinate command. Three months later, TMC became the Army Aviation and Surface Materiel Command, which was redesignated in 1964 as AVCOM. On AMC’s fourth anniversary, AVCOM was separated from MOCOM and established as an AMC major subordinate command, still in St. Louis, becoming the Army Aviation Systems Command (AVSCOM) in 1968.

AVSCOM was merged with the Army Troop Support Command (TROSCOM) in 1977, forming the Troop Support and Aviation Materiel Readiness Command (TSARCOM); its aviation R&D mission was assigned to the newly established Aviation Research & Development Command (AVRADCOM).

In a near-duplication of what was happening at Redstone, in 1984 AVSCOM was reestablished, with AVRADCOM and all aviation-related components of TSARCOM transferred to it. Eight years later, the bulk of missions performed by AVSCOM and TROSCOM were consolidated within the new Aviation and Troop Command (ATCOM).

As part of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) commission, ATCOM was disestablished and its mission and organizations moved to Redstone, where they were merged in 1997 with MICOM to create the Army’s first unified Aviation and Missile Command (AMCOM). As with its sister commodity commands under AMC, the LCM task was added in 2004, giving AMCOM LCMC’s commander primary responsibility for the life cycle of all Army aviation and missile systems.

Within the new AMCOM, IMMC was created to help support cost-effective aviation and missile readiness and coordinate with PEOs and PMs in both realms to integrate its core functions of acquisition logistics, supply chain management and maintenance.

“That brought a significant amount of change to our organization because we had to merge two separate cultures that managed different commodities, which required several years of reorientation and retraining to make sure we had all our processes and organizations properly reconfigured and functioning,” Roberson said.

“Missile systems inherently are low maintenance and fairly low cost to sustain; aviation systems are on the opposite end of that spectrum, requiring a tremendous amount of maintenance and spare parts. So we went up an order of magnitude to handle that. From a dollar perspective, the demand for aviation systems is about 10-fold what you see on the missile side, but we keep that in balance and anything associated with the budget impacts them equally.”

That was a significant consideration as the Army’s aviation and missile communities sought to deal with all the complexities of relocation and merger while coming off a decade of reduced budgets – only to face the most demanding requirements since World War II in the high operations tempo of post-9/11 combat in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Throughout the last 10 years, we have been focused on one thing and one thing only: Supporting the warfighters, ensuring they have everything they need in terms of sustainment to prosecute the war – spare parts, maintenance and the capability to go out every day in the fight,” Roberson said. “But our available stock and back order rates for component parts were lower than our goals due to budget constraints during the ‘90s, which impacted both aviation and missiles.

“From an OPSTEMPO perspective, because this has fundamentally been a rotary-wing war, we obviously have consumed a lot of aircraft. We had a peak of 750 aircraft in theater while we were still in Iraq, declining to around 550 now, creating a big demand for maintenance and spare parts. But we’ve also had to support the missile side, deploying Patriot and tactical missile systems that also have been consumed at a high rate; they just don’t get the same level of publicity as aviation. But we have Patriot radars deployed throughout SW Asia and all the combat teams we support in theater use weapons we produce, such as the Hellfire missile.”

In addition to all the reorganizations, name changes and shifting missions, what became AMCOM LCMC was responsible for a number of significant fieldings under AMC, according to staff historian Kaylene Hughes.

“I think the Hawk air defense system was key in the 1960s, as well as the Chinook, which was developed in that decade and continues to operate today. They were primarily created to support the ongoing conflict in Vietnam and in response to some of our Cold War concerns,” Roberson added. “The anti-tank systems were developed primarily to meet Cold War requirements, but have morphed and adapted to meet evolving combat threats.”

“When the Big Five systems [Abrams, Bradley, HMMWV, Black Hawk, Apache] were created in the 1970s, our contributions were the Black Hawk, Patriot and Apache, which have been the three major systems that shaped the way we prosecute wars today,” he said. “The requirements for those were generated from past experience in Vietnam, but what’s important is we have continuously modified them from their initial fieldings to adapt to the ever-changing threat we see and the individual threats affecting our air and ground forces, staying within the turning radius of the threat to ensure we field systems with maximum capability to defeat those threats.”

“We have a tendency in DoD to go through periods of budget increase to combat wars, as in Vietnam, then on the back side that drops until we decide we are falling behind, which is what happened in the Reagan years when budgets increased,” noted Executive Director of AMCOM’s Integrated Materiel Management Center Keith Roberson. “The Patriot, Black Hawk, and Apache were seen as needing to continue to evolve to fight the Cold War threat.”

“On the cyclic approach, we again were coming off a high cycle from the Reagan build-up years. The Cold War ended, so we went into sustainment mode to maintain our warfighting posture as well as we could. We also began assessing new non-linear threats we had to fight in the 1990s, so we adapted all our weapons systems to defeat those new threats,” he recalled.

“The development of unmanned aerial systems to help with surveillance and intel also was a major focus in the 1990s, but we also started evolving those into systems capable of having weapons systems integrated to defeat certain threats. That is a key part of our history and the evolution of TTPs [tactics, techniques and procedures] in Southwest Asia in the new century.”

“In 1962, MICOM was one of AMC’s original major subordinate commands, in charge of all missile, rocket and associated project offices/missions associated with those types of Army weapon systems,” AMC staff historian Kaylene Hughes concluded. “Today, AMCOM teams with other organizations to support a joint fighting force engaged in combat and peacekeeping missions across the globe, as well maintaining the Army’s role in various homeland security issues and worldwide humanitarian aid efforts.”

 

AMCOM Highlights

 1960s

• Fielding first version of the Pershing missile, which ultimately evolved into the Pershing II intermediate range missile central to the 1998 INF Treaty
• Development of the TOW antitank missile
• Increasing importance of the Chinook helicopter in combat/general use

1970s

• Fielding of the TOW, first Army missile successfully fired in combat by U.S. Soldiers (in Vietnam)
• Continuing refinements/major upgrades to nuclear systems, such as the Lance (one of its proposed warheads was dubbed the “neutron bomb”)
• Black Hawk helicopter fielded

1980s

• Development of the Patriot missile system, MLRS and Hellfire missiles
• First combat use of the Apache Attack Helicopter, Operation Just Cause (Panama, December 1989 to January 1990)

1990s

• First major use of Patriot, MLRS and Hellfire in Operation Desert Storm (1991)
• Apache major deployments and missions during Desert Storm and in the Balkans
• Javelin shoulder-fired antitank missile first fielded (development started in 1980s)
• Continuing upgrades to other missile and helicopter systems

2000s

• Numerous improvements to current systems based on “lessons learned” in Southwest Asia
• Hellfire mounted on UAVs – a successful development in response to the demands of an asymmetrical, counter-insurgency battlespace in Iraq and Afghanistan
• Proliferation of UAVs, especially after 2005

This story was first published in U.S. Army Material Command: 50 Years of Providing the Decisive Edge