Depot Maintenance: Accurate and Complete Data Needed to Meet DOD's Core Capability Reporting Requirements

Abstract : DOD Instruction 4151.2012 prescribes a depot maintenance core capabilities determination process to identify, in part, the (1) required core capabilities for depot maintenance and (2) planned workload needed to support those capabilities. Within OSD, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness is responsible for, among other things, maintaining the instruction. The instruction describes a series of mathematical computations and adjustments which the military services use to compute their core capability requirements and to identify planned workload needed to support these requirements. The military services identify the weapon systems required to execute the Joint Chiefs of Staff contingency scenarios, which represent plans for responding to conflicts that may occur in the future. After the systems are identified, the military services compute annual depot maintenance capability requirements for peacetime in direct labor hours to represent the amount of time they regularly take to perform required maintenance. Next, the military services make contingency requirements and resource adjustments to account for applicable surge factors during the different phases of a contingency, such as preparation/readiness and sustainment. The military services make further adjustments to account for redundancy in depot capability. For example, a military service may determine that repair capabilities for specific systems maintained in military depots are so similar that they share common base repair processes, technologies, and capabilities that can effectively satisfy the repair requirements of other systems. The military services adjust the core capability requirements when one service s maintenance requirements will be supported by the maintenance capabilities of other military services.