Defense Logistics Agency unveils restructuring effort

The Defense Logistics Agency has launched a campaign to overhaul its headquarters operations and field commands, while the Pentagon ponders whether to move the Defense Contract Management Command out of DLA entirely.

"This restructuring will cause us to behave like a corporation and give us better leverage to use our corporate capabilities," wrote Lt. Gen. Henry T. Glisson, director of DLA, in a letter last week announcing the reorganization plan.

According to DLA, the decision to make DCMC its own agency rests with the Pentagon and is separate from the reorganization effort.

DLA has been studying how to improve its operations since last summer, when Glisson chartered a group of top executives to ensure that the agency was ready to support warfighters in the 21st century, said DLA spokesman Dan McGinty.

The organizational realignment is one piece of a larger plan to transform DLA into a modern agency. Other strategic objectives include acquiring automated business systems, partnering with industry, improving employee training and replenishing the agency's workforce.

The reorganization will draw clearer lines of responsibility within the DLA hierarchy, McGinty said. Under the agency's current structure, responsibility for technology, procurement and other operations is sometimes scattered. "We want to make sure that all of our operations follow a corporate-wide rulebook," he said.

The Defense Logistics Support Command will be altered to look more like customers' logistics operations, Glisson wrote in his letter. DLA's information technology operations will be merged into a single office, and financial operations will assume a higher role in the agency as the finance office will move up to be on the same organizational level as technology, contracting and logistics offices.

Finally, special support services such as the offices of General Counsel, Equal Employment Opportunity and Small Business will be joined in a new DLA Support Services Office. Heads of these operations will report directly to Glisson. "This move will eliminate duplication and unnecessary layering of policy and support services organizations as we become a more agile and efficient enterprise," Glisson wrote.

DLA officials say they aren't sure sure when they'll get a decision from the Pentagon on the status of DCMC. But the other reforms are scheduled to be in place within six to eight months.