Red River's Running

tacked on wood pallets outside Building 493 at Red River Army Depot, Texas, lie the mechanical casualties of the Army's relentless campaign in Iraq: hundreds of worn-out tracks from the service's wartime workhorses, Bradley Fighting Vehicles-33.5-ton armored transports with anti-tank weapons that can carry up to nine soldiers and attack enemy vehicles.

Rubber tread still clings to the steel Bradley tracks, baked rusty orange by the sand and heat of the Arabian Peninsula. The Army ships used tracks from Iraq to this rubber production facility in rural northeastern Texas, about 20 miles west of the Arkansas border, where they will be given new life.

In 24 hours, the plant will refurbish enough tracks to enable four Bradleys to rumble another 1,000 miles across the desert. Red River will scorch tread off the tracks in a furnace at nearly 2,000 degrees and spin the rust and sand off at 50,000 rotations per minute in an enclosed chamber. Then, plant workers will mold new rubber tread to the tracks and send them back to the Middle East. Before the war, the depot put out new tracks for about 30 Bradleys each month. Today it's making enough tracks for 100 or so a month.

The pace of operations in Iraq is wearing down Bradley tracks far more quickly than expected. The long, double-time march of 358 miles from Kuwait City to Baghdad in March and the relentless pace of patrols since then have put as many miles on the Bradleys in a few months as they normally would travel in a year. Bradleys have become the vehicle of choice for patrolling post-war Iraq because they offer greater protection from ongoing attacks than do less well-protected Humvees. But as their tracks deteriorate, more and more Bradleys are being sidelined.

The length and high tempo of Iraq operations are stressing all the Army's depots. Gary Motsek, deputy commander for support operations at the Army Materiel Command, says all five depots-at Red River; Anniston, Ala.; Corpus Christi, Texas; Letterkenny, Pa.; and Tobyhanna, Pa.-are spending more money and employing more people this year than last year. Spending is expected to double from $2 billion in fiscal 2003 to $4.5 billion in 2004, and overall employment could rise by as much as 15 percent-from about 7,000 to 8,000 or more.

"Depots across the board will be executing substantially more work than they have in the past," says Motsek. To handle the rising tide of work, the Army may, for the first time, request a Pentagon waiver of the so-called "50-50" rule, which prevents contractors from performing more than half of all depot work. The Army is running out of people and space to do the work. Currently, the Army contracts out about 48 percent of its depot work to contractors.

The challenges facing Red River are illustrative of the burdens all Army depots face as fighting continues in Iraq. Among them: a sharp increase in overtime for workers, constant juggling of production schedules and shortages of spare parts. Baghdad may be thousands of miles from Red River, but the bruising pace of war has come home for managers and workers there.

WORKING OVERTIME

Just inside the south entrance to Building 493, two workers wearing yellow earplugs and safety glasses stand at the start of the Bradley track assembly line. They rev their electric drills like motorcycles, easing pins from worn-out track. About 80 percent of the track material will be recycled, although the pins and all the rubber will have to be replaced. Once the pins are gone and the rubber lands in a trash bin, the workers turn their attention to the steel shoes-the square skeletal frames that hold the rubber treads in place-looking for defects that might prevent them from being re-used.

Lately, workers have had to discard more shoes than usual. Under normal wear, Bradley tracks are changed once a year, after 1,000 miles of wear. Today they are reaching the 1,000-mile mark in two or three months. As a result, the Red River production facility, the Army's only in-house source of Bradley tracks (Goodyear does some limited work), has gone from producing 5,000 to 6,000 shoes a month (enough to outfit about 30 Bradleys) to as many as 18,000 a month (enough for about 107 Bradleys). This year, the facility has ramped up from three shifts, five days a week, to three shifts-including one that's 12 hours long-seven days a week. The number of federal workers at the rubber plant has increased from 78 to 128 and more contractors have been brought on under short-term contracts to help cover the added shifts.

Depot employees say they view the extra hours as their contribution to the war. Many wage-grade employees have worked so much overtime that they have stopped getting extra pay. Instead, they trade their overtime for more vacation days because earning more money would push them into higher tax brackets. Russell Vogeltanz, a front-line supervisor in the rubber facility, says he usually has no problem finding workers willing to extend their shift from eight to 12 hours or to work a weekend, though "it's a little hard to make people come out on Sunday, being the Lord's Day," he says.

Not only have workers been putting in overtime, but they also have been going places they never expected. Before the Iraq war began, the Army transformed an empty warehouse at the Army's Arifjan Camp in Kuwait into a sixth depot. Nearly 500 civilian workers rotated in and out of the front-line repair center during the past year preparing for combat and then maintaining equipment during the fighting. It is the first depot created in a theater of war. Motsek says that having a depot near the battlefield saves the money and time required to ship equipment stateside. "Instead of just pushing parts and giving advice, these guys are there tearing down engines and making repairs," he says.

Buster Mitchell, a Red River heavy equipment supervisor, spent four months in Iraq this spring overseeing repairs to Army truck engines and doing plenty more. Mitchell helped build sterile "clean" rooms for engine work in the Camp Arifjan warehouse, repaired Navy boat engines and served as a trouble-shooter when soldiers showed up at the Kuwaiti depot with broken-down vehicles. Recalling the long lines of vehicles disabled by battle or sand damage he saw awaiting shipment to Red River, Mitchell says, "We'll get even busier here when those come back home."

MANAGING THE LINE

The growing workload and fast pace are taking a toll on depot machinery. Back on the rubber facility's production line, a worker watches the temperature gauge of one of the huge furnaces as it inches up past 910, then 920 and finally to 930 degrees, the point where pins loosen their grip and rubber peels away from Bradley tracks. A single furnace can burn 200 pounds of rubber in an hour. But on a recent autumn day, one of the plant's two furnaces was offline for maintenance. It's the Catch-22 of a busy production schedule; the more work you have, the more frequently the machinery needs to be repaired.

Red River's commander, Col. Michael Cervone, says the increased workload makes proper maintenance more important. Without it, the depot risks catastrophic breakdown of the entire production system. This summer, the rubber line was shut down for five days for maintenance in advance of this fall's onslaught. Cervone concedes that deciding which machines to take down when is a challenge. If a machine devoted to Bradley production needs to come down, the line might be rearranged to build wheels for Abrams tanks or tracks for armored personnel vehicles. Late deliveries from suppliers also can shut down the line, and recently, late deliveries have become more common.

The Army can't force Bradley parts suppliers to work faster. Just two vendors supply more than 12,000 pins and other fasteners that Red River now uses each week to assemble tracks. Depot production planners meet weekly with their suppliers to gauge whether they can meet the depot's demands. If not, the Bradley track production line must be slowed. "If they get off schedule with one shipment, usually they get on schedule with the next shipment," says Morris Raultson, a chief program analyst at the depot. But slowing the line to wait for a part can cause a ripple effect that disrupts schedules even further. For example, if the raw rubber strips injected into molds to form Bradley track treads are not used quickly enough, they can spoil. So slow the line too much, and you've wasted a load of raw rubber.

In mid-October, dozens of stacks of partly built Bradley tracks lay on wooden pallets in the Red River rubber facility, set aside in mid-production due to parts delays and line slowdowns. Refurbished shoes awaited rubber treads. Shoes with treads awaited pins to hold them together. Managers said none of the tracks would remain half-built for more than a few days, but hours of planning meetings couldn't alleviate the bottlenecks that left the tracks unfinished. The volume of work sometimes simply overwhelms the depot. But on the whole, Red River is meeting its delivery promises, says Cervone. "Sometimes we are a little ahead, sometimes we are a little behind, but we have met all of our monthly targets."

RISKING A 'DEAD STOP'

Across the depot, managers and workers lament the dwindling inventory of spare parts, complaining they're down to a few days' supply. No repair projects have been halted for lack of spares, but managers expect the situation to worsen as fighting in Iraq continues, especially for parts for older systems whose components aren't easy to come by.

"All depot commanders are concerned about it," says Cervone, adding that the shortages are worse stateside because troops in the field have first dibs on spares. He says that without better ways to replenish the system, depots risk a "dead stop" in production sometime soon. The Army already has improved its spare parts supply chain, Motsek says, by moving to a single stocking system controlled by the Army Materiel Command. In the past, divisions stocked their own parts and their multiple stock tracking systems made it hard to find items and shift them among users. Motsek says the single stock system more easily shifts parts to soldiers in the field, so fewer spares remain in depots' warehouses.

Anne Haarmeyer, chief of the Red River production management division, says it could be three or four years after fighting ends in Iraq before depot managers have fully stocked shelves again. In the meantime, managers have had to become more creative in finding parts in short supply. Local suppliers can manufacture basics, such as filters, hoses and belts. In rare cases, the Army buys back surplus parts from companies to which it has sold them. Increasingly, the Army is cannibalizing equipment it has retired from service or considers expendable.

On the Red River production line, supervisor Joe Dastillion steps gingerly around a puddle of water that has formed beneath a 1980s-model Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Just in from the storage lot, the vehicle is dirt-crusted, with weeds growing out of one side. Cast aside in favor of newer models, the Bradley had moldered on a dirt lot with hundreds of other outdated vehicles waiting to be tapped for scrap. Instead, the war in Iraq will bring this Bradley-or at least some of it-back to life.

Dastillion has his assembly line workers remove rotor arms-four steel bars that connect the vintage Bradley's hull to its track. They'll be used to repair more recent model Bradleys to fill orders from Iraq. The rotor arms normally require minimal maintenance, but in Iraq, with no time for even simple upkeep and the inexorable abrasion of sand, they wear out quickly. In about an hour and a half, a geriatric Bradley can be stripped of four rotors and moved back out to the lot. Manufacturing the steel bars would be time-consuming and expensive since few new Bradleys are being built, Dastillion says. Harvesting rotor arms from old vehicles is fast, cheap and vital now that Red River's running just to keep up.