Withdrawl from Iraq - The IT/Supply Chain perspective

In my recent copy of baseline magazine a magazine targeted at chief information officers (CIOs). I saw an article called "How to leave Iraq"

I always like to read diaries that take a non-political perspective on issues we talk about here so I thought I pull out some excerpts from this one.  

On Sept. 15, Gen. David Petraeus, who commands the troops in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the American ambassador to that country, will return to Washington, D.C., to report on how the war is going and whether the extra combat troops President Bush ordered last January have made any difference. The president says he is awaiting their report. For months, he has resisted pressure from Congress to set a date for calling the troops home.

They haven't gotten the word that its now the Petraeus White House Report.

A quick pell-mell pullout with no setbacks could take six months, according to retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank.

On the other hand, a withdrawal of this magnitude—which, in addition to the logistical challenge, could risk attacks by Al Qaeda or Iraqi sectarian forces trying to make a withdrawal look like a rout—could take two years, says Maj. Gen. Michael Diamond, deputy director of the logistics directorate at U.S. Central Command, the unified combat command in charge of Iraq.

well the sooner you start the sooner you finish... just like I tell my son about his homework...

The military has been working on exit plans for several months. The withdrawal is being managed by U.S. Central Command—one of the Defense Department's 10 multiservice regional units—which is in charge of an area that includes Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

I'm glad somebody has been working on this. They probably have to do it "under the radar".

If a faster exit is needed, the military may go to a crisis plan, which Nash refers to as "cut-and-run in the most pejorative sense of the term." For example, equipment or supplies that can't be hauled home quickly might be demilitarized and buried, says Paul Peters, director of DRMS, but that is "an action of last resort." Diamond says the military won't bury equipment, though he declines to discuss any specific contingency plans.

In addition to its other challenges, the military is working in the midst of a years-long mandate to streamline and modernize the Defense Department's stovepiped computer systems, some of which are custom-coded and decades old-yet still important to getting troops and supplies home. Some of this work began in 2003 because of problems getting equipment and supplies into Iraq after the war started. Repair parts and other material piled up because they were inefficiently packed and had to be manually sorted once they arrived. Troops kept reordering because the computers couldn't tell them where the stuff was. The Government Accountability Office, which conducts investigations for Congress, found a $1.2 billion discrepancy between material shipped to the Army and material received by the troops. Even today, the GAO says, Defense has 2,980 separate business systems. And some of the business systems the Defense Department uses to support the troops have been labeled "high-risk" by the GAO for several years. As of April 30, they say, more than 54,000 cargo containers in Iraq and Afghanistan were missing

So its not just rifles, it seems like we have problems finding alot of things.

Different parts of the Defense Department are working on separate plans for modernizing their business systems. The Marines and the Army, for example, are installing software packages from arch-rivals to make their supply chains more efficient. The Marines chose Oracle's E-Business Suite; the Army, SAP's mySAP suite. Groups across the Defense Department are consolidating servers and databases and creating service-oriented architectures so different systems can communicate more efficiently. All individual projects are supposed to fit into a departmentwide Business Enterprise Architecture, a blueprint that specifies data standards, business rules and operating requirements. The GAO says that architecture is now filtering down to the services. Project completion dates stretch out to 2015 and beyond.

ouch 2015 ?!?! didn't we make it to the moon sooner like 8 years after Kennedy announced he wanted to go?