Interim Brigade Combat Team Munitions Distribution Study

The high frequency and wide range of contingency operations during the last decade has sharply increased the significance of military responsiveness. The Army of the future will need to be able to quickly respond to a full spectrum of conflict--from stability and support operations to major theater wars. Today, military leaders have limited options when reacting to the wide range of current threats existing in our world. The nation needs ground combat units that can deploy very rapidly to stabilize a hostile area while possessing combat capabilities able to terminate a threat if necessary. The Army's answer to this requirement is the Interim Brigade Combat Team (IBCT). Logistically supporting the IBCT will require the Army to leverage new technologies to automate supply activities, enhance communications, and minimize the intra-theater logistics footprint. The Brigade Support Battalion (BSB) is designed to provide distribution-based, combat service support to the IBCT leveraging many of the newest technologies available. One of the important missions of the BSB is to establish an ammunition transfer point (ATP) for the storage and distribution of ammunition stocks to all customer units throughout the IBCT area. This study employs an Arena 5.0 discrete-event simulation model to explore the capabilities of the IBCT ammunition transfer point to determine if the system will perform as predicted--to be capable of meeting a daily throughput level of 138 short tons of ammunition in support of the IBCT. Imposing realistic battlefield variance on the modeled system, a statistical analysis is performed to reveal significant factors influencing ATP system performance.