| LTC Timothy Lindsay | James McLaughlin | Norman P. Bruneau |
COL (Retired) David H. Hackworth has described Bosnia-Herzegovina as "Hell in a Cold Place" for troops during their long and hazardous peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia. The military analyst and author accurately pictured a cold, wet, muddy and mine-infested land in a Newsweek magazine article last December when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces took command and control of the theater from the United Nations Protection Force.
This area in the Balkan theater lacked almost all the infrastructure necessary for the billeting and the field services to support the NATO peacekeepers and the logisticians supporting them. Some 20,000 US troops were part of the 60,000-member NATO implementation force.
However, the Army's premier bare base support system, called Force Provider, now provides a high-quality alternative to the more than 5,000 service members of Task Force Eagle in the vicinity of Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Last winter, between 8 Nov 95 and 23 Feb 96, a Force Provider Deployment Support Team consisting of seven members from the US Army Materiel Command and one from the Quartermaster combat development team at the US Army Combined Arms Support Command (USACASCOM) coordinated Force Provider's deployment. Team members believe they and the Force Provider system have made a great difference in the quality of life for many of Task Force Eagle's soldiers. In fact, this deployment of Force Provider marks a historically significant event in the Army's approach to field services and base camp support.
Force Provider, born in 1991 of the Army Chief of Staff's concerns about inadequate field living conditions for US soldiers during Operation Desert Shield/Storm, is a containerized, highly deployable and complete bare base system. Force Provider is engineered for climate-controlled billeting; dining facilities; showers; latrines; laundry; and morale, welfare and recreational facilities in multiple battalion-sized modules designed for 550 soldiers. Force Provider is packaged complete with water storage and distribution, fuel storage and distribution, wastewater storage, and power generation and distribution. The basic building block for the system is the tent, extendable modular personnel (TEMPER) with forced air heating and cooling, similar to home heating and air conditioning systems.
Missions for the Force Provider include rest and refit for combat-weary soldiers, theater reception, intermediate staging base, redeployment, base camps, humanitarian operations, disaster relief, and peacekeeping. A total of 36 Force Provider modules are now funded through FY02.
Force Provider, a nondevelopmental item conceived by the US Army Quartermaster Center and School (USAQMC&S) and jointly supported by Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA), Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics and Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, took advantage of existing military and commercial products. The USAQMC&S developed an operational requirements document that has been remarkably stable and contributed to rapid and affordable development, testing and production. The US Army Natick Research, Development and Engineering Center, Soldier Systems Command, successfully designed the Force Provider's prototype and continues with dedicated development, test and engineering support.
Force Provider went through an accelerated phase between 1991 and May 1994 after successful operational testing at Fort Bragg, NC, in November 1993. At the same time, the USAQMC&S developed six Quartermaster Force Provider companies, with two planned for the Active Component and four for the Reserve Component. Each company has six platoons. Each platoon has the mission of erecting and operating one 550-soldier support module. The companies were organized as "Type B" units, which means they require extensive augmentation to perform their mission.
Even though Force Provider went rapidly through development and testing in 1993 and 1994, Army leadership required an interim capability to support contingency missions before the scheduled delivery of the first two Force Provider production modules in December 1996. Therefore, HQDA ordered the assembly of 12 interim support package modules, each supporting 550 soldiers, from Army inventory. Equivalent to the Force Provider system, six modules in an interim support package can support a brigade-sized force of 3,300 soldiers.
Interim Support Package 1 has been deployed on the prepositioning ship Gopher State since Summer 1994, and Interim Support Package 2 was deployed to Bosnia this year. Also, the test module from Fort Bragg was deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and operated by the 488th Quartermaster Force Provider Company based at Fort Bragg.
In January 1994, the USAQMC&S requested and received assistance to develop a Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) support plan for Force Provider. Such a LOGCAP plan ensured that civilian contractors would be available, when needed, to augment the Army's Force Provider companies or to operate Force Provider camps if the Army's Force Provider unit is not available. As of August 1995, only the 488th Quartermaster Force Provider Company had been activated, and it was deployed to Guantanamo Bay. This situation led to the use of civilian contractors to operate the Force Provider camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
For Operation Joint Endeavor in Bosnia-Herzegovina, six Force Provider modules were deployed: two modules each at three base camps in the Tuzla Valley. Comanche Base (Tuzla West) has a population of 1,700 soldiers, Steel Castle Base (Tuzla East) a population of 1,800 soldiers, and Lukavac Base (also known as Gotham City) a population of 2,150. The interim support package modules provided 3,300 billeting spaces in TEMPER tents. Another 2,000 billets were provided by general purpose (GP) medium tents shipped with the Force Provider modules, plus additional GP medium tents for administrative space at each camp. The resulting 5,270 billeting spaces provided by Force Provider represented 54 percent of all billeting required in the Tuzla Valley for Task Force Eagle and 25 percent of all space required for US forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Members of the Force Provider team on the ground in Kaposvar and Tuzla successfully coordinated Force Provider movement from the intermediate staging base to the correct location in the Tuzla Valley. At no time were construction schedules of the three base camps delayed by the arrival of Force Provider equipment, but flexibility was essential under very demanding and sometimes chaotic circumstances, particularly in the deployment's early stages. Inadequate local communications, materials handling equipment and transportation further complicated the smooth execution of the mission. Long-distance communication, including satellite, was available and necessary to the effective daily movements coordination and status reporting. Intransit visibility was provided by the eyes, ears and hands of the team members for the ground movement. Despite radio frequency tagging of the hundreds of individual pieces of cargo shipped from the US to European ports and then to the Tuzla Valley, a system of tag interrogators and also communications and information architecture was not in place during these early stages of the deployment to take advantage of this technology.
The speed of the deployment, the "friction of war" and associated "fog" required close and continuous coordination of materiel movement with 1st Armored Division command and staff units, higher commands, US-based support elements and numerous other activities in and around Tuzla. Force Provider modules and other equipment had to get to the right place at the right time. On-site direction of vehicle offload operations and coordination with the construction teams were essential to the efficient construction and handoff of the modules.
The Force Provider team arrived in Tuzla on December 29 and immediately began coordination with the military units and civilian contractors for the site preparation and construction of the camps. The Force Provider team attended daily planning and status meetings with the Task Force Eagle Base Camp Coordinating Agency, the focal point for constructing tent cities and Force Provider modules. Despite construction delays because of the bad weather in mid-to-late December that restricted the airflow into Tuzla and caused flooding on the Sava River, the flow of Force Provider modules began on December 31. However, poor terrain conditions plagued all the base camp construction schedules with extraordinary demands for materials and a shortage of heavy construction equipment.
The master schedule for construction of the camps in the Tuzla Valley called for the US Air Force Red Horse Engineering Squadron to construct two tent cities at Tuzla Main, Task Force Eagle Headquarters. The Red Horse was at work constructing 1,200 billet spaces when the Force Provider Development Support Team arrived. The Red Horse would plan and begin building Tuzla West (Comanche Base) and Tuzla East (Steele Castle Base) within a week after the two Tuzla Main camps. Their support was professional and key to the success of the Force Provider mission.
Construction of the first camp at Lukavac began January 5. The Force Provider deployment team worked with the civilian contractor on proper layout, assembly, installation and checkout of all systems and subsystems. The Lukavac site, while very confined, did provide some fixed facilities for a variety of administrative and troop support functions, including a dining facility instead of Force Provider's modular equipment. The camp was complete on January 28. The Force Provider facilities were built on the surface of a coal bin at the Lukavac Coke Plant. Confined space caused difficulties in the staging, unpacking, inventory and organization of the worksite as the work proceeded and less space was available. By the time for football's Super Bowl in January, the morale, welfare and recreation facilities were partially complete and provided live feed of the Armed Forces Network signal for the soldiers of Lukavac Base.
Camp design began on December 31 with a site survey. Security for the site had not yet been assured, and soldiers still occupied old MIG (a Russian-built fighter plane) aircraft hangers in the immediate vicinity. Site security was a concern throughout the camp construction with the continuous presence of Bosnian children, adults and soldiers in and around the construction areas. The initial site chosen for a 2,200-soldier camp (later revised to a 1,700-soldier camp) was an open field adjacent to the airstrip, a macadam surface approximately 6,500 feet in length and 50 feet in width with unprepared grass shoulders. (The 4th Aviation Brigade wanted to use the entire airstrip for air operations.) While large enough for the camp, the initial open site had clay soil with a very high water table that engineers said would require about 60 days of site preparation, including mine clearing, before beginning camp construction. The soil conditions also complicated mine clearing operations or made them impractical.
These facts all conspired to force a compromise in camp location and design, resulting in most of the camp placed on about 2,500 feet of airstrip and then the dining facility, laundry operation and administrative facilities on a smaller section of the original site. While certainly not ideal, the resulting design demonstrates the flexibility of the Force Provider system. The 1,700 billeting spaces; showers; field-expedient latrines; and morale, welfare and recreation facilities including chaplain, medical, sports and recreation facilities, and a movie theater were all ready and occupied by January 25 by the 4th Aviation Brigade and the 18th Military Police Brigade. On February 9, General John M. Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, toured the facilities at Comanche Base with other top-ranking Army officers. General Shalikashvili, aware of similar US Air Force bare base systems, was impressed with the Army's commitment to providing high-quality life support for soldiers.
Steel Castle Base, home of the 1st Armored Division Engineers and Division Artillery, was appropriately named. Built on a grass airstrip, the camp had less than ideal soil and hydrology conditions, but did have stabilizing vegetation. Extreme care was taken during site preparation to construct gravel roads and service access and provide container staging sites before moving Force Provider modules into the site. Construction began on January 14. The first of two modules arrived on January 23, and the last of the six modules (two for each camp) arrived by ground at Steel Castle Base on January 31. As in the case of the other camps, the Force Provider 20-foot ISO (International Organization for Standardization) containers were designed into the force protection plan to supplement other protective measures. Being within a few kilometers and within sight of the zone of separation between the Bosnians and Serbs underscored the importance of this capability. These Force Provider containers were also planned and sited for storage and administrative space. Steel Castle Base was complete by February 16 and ready for initial occupancy on February 19.
Each Force Provider camp had the ranking colonel as the camp commander. Each commander appointed an officer, in each case a major, as the camp's mayor. This structure served exceptionally well for the necessary customer interface and command and control during all phases of camp design, assembly and handoff. The commanders all took a very active and personal interest in each and every step of the process. This structure also served well as a focal point for coordination meetings with all the principals. The Force Provider Deployment Support Team initiated coordination meetings and final camp walk-throughs at handoffs to assure the camps were built to the leadership's satisfaction and that the duties and responsibilities of the construction crews and operators were defined and communicated to all. The meeting agendas included camp construction status and schedule; roles, responsibilities and relationships of all the players; capabilities and characteristics of the Force Provider system; and the commander's comments and issues.
As the responsible individual for the Force Provider modules, the division property book officer had a pivotal role in the inventory and handoff of the equipment, establishment of supply and maintenance policy, and inventory control throughout the sustainment phase of the operation. This officer directed appropriate levels of subhandreceipts, coordinated further cross-leveling of equipment where directed by higher headquarters, and assisted LOGCAP in establishing a Department of Defense activity address code and supply support activity for Class IX (repair parts) support for Force Provider equipment. While manually prepared hand receipts were used in Bosnia for inventory and handoff from the project management office, subsequent production systems will have automated interfaces with Army Standard Army Management Information Systems, such as the Unit Level Logistics System, to simplify Force Provider's inventory, handoff and system maintenance during future deployments.
Coordination with other agencies that make the Force Provider camp a community included the Army and Air Force Exchange Service for establishing tactical field exchanges (one in each camp); Armed Forces Network for installing satellite dishes and/or antennas for television and radio; and the morale, welfare and recreation (MWR) specialist assigned to the camps to run the MWR sets. The Force Provider Deployment Support Team also teamed up early with the Army Center for Lessons Learned to begin documenting system performance from deployment and assembly through handoff and sustainment and, hopefully, through retrograde.
Lessons learned from the perspective of the USAQMC&S and the USACASCOM divide into two categories: What could we have done differently? What can we do for the future? We should have insisted on including Force Provider expertise on the site selection team. This expertise probably would have averted some early problems with site preparation and camp layout. We have redesigned the Force Provider units, as a result of experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to have the capability of operating a minimum number of six Force Provider camps without support from a civilian contractor. To better prepare for future operations, the Army still needs to ensure that all Force Provider units are trained and readily deployable to operate or supervise contractor operations of Force Provider.
The end result of this total team effort to support Task Force Eagle was the largely successful deployment of a superior bare-base system providing warm, sanitary, healthful living facilities and recreational outlets for more than 5,000 service members performing a very difficult and lengthy mission.
The vision of the Army leadership in 1991 is manifested on the ground in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in an effective Force Provider system. The mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina presented an excellent opportunity in the system's first major deployment for the project manager to assess firsthand Force Provider's operational effectiveness and suitability and to obtain direct and immediate feedback from the customer about the system's strengths and shortcomings. The Force Provider Deployment Support Team learned many lessons during this mission that will continue to be fed back to the design, development, production and integrated logistics support for a more responsive and ready Force Provider in the future.
LTC Timothy Lindsay, Acquisition Corps, is Product Manager for Force Provider. He is a graduate of the Program Management Course, Defense Service Management College, Command and General Staff College and the Ordnance Officer Basic and Advanced Courses. LTC Lindsay has a master of science degree in materials science (composite materials) from the University of Delaware and a bachelor of arts degree in natural sciences from St. John's University, Minnesota.
James McLaughlin, Chief of the Force Provider Research, Development, Testing and Engineering Team, Natick Research, Development and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts, is a graduate of Northeastern University with 16 1/2 years of engineering experience with the US Army.
Norman P. Bruneau, Combat Developer for Force Provider, is assigned to the Quartermaster combat developments team at the US Army Combined Arms Support Command, Fort Lee, Virginia. He is also the Combat Development Project Officer for all Army airdrop and slingload equipment. He is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College, Foreign Area Officer Course, and the Special Forces Officer Course, with more than 30 years experience in logistics and special operations.