How to add five divisions of combat power to the Army

Without Recruiting a Single Soldier

The U.S. Army wastes seventy million hours each year, the equivalent of three combat divisions, on analog inventory processes: hand-counting gear, reconciling paper printouts with spreadsheets, and feeding data into enterprise systems everyone knows are wrong. Those hours translate to about $4 billion in lost productivity annually, yet the Army still cannot produce an auditable record of what it owns or what condition its equipment is in. The Department of War has never passed a financial audit; are we really to believe that all of its logistics systems are “green” across the board?

This waste is not a relic of old habits but a symptom of broken tools. Despite decades of “transformation” and billions spent on “modern” systems, the Army still manages logistics in much the same way as Alexander or Napoleon or the Russians we love to malign, with planning based on manual counts, delayed updates, and a life-and-death hope that ground truth is not too different from whatever exists in the official record.

Hope is not a plan. Ask those Russians.

The Army doesn’t cling to clipboards out of nostalgia. It does so because, despite billions invested, its systems have never made it easy to capture ground truth. I’ve seen firsthand how commanders at every level are forced to choose between honesty and compliance, rewarding the illusion of readiness over reality. The result is a culture that erodes training time, corrodes trust, and drives out the best soldiers. Seventy million wasted hours per year is not inefficiency — it is a profound corrosion of combat power.

Digitizing property at the edge and capturing real-time ground-truth data where soldiers actually work is the single most transformative modernization initiative the Army could undertake. Forget AI, autonomy, or long-range precision fires. Automating even 80 percent of logistics billets and repurposing those hours would yield roughly 63,000 soldier-equivalents, four to five divisions of combat power, without recruiting a single new soldier.

In an era when our adversaries will always outnumber us, America’s advantage must be time and truth, not mass. To win the next war, the Army must turn pen and paper into ones and zeroes.

0. Digitizing the edge is the single most transformative investment our military can make

I was catching up recently with a friend from British SBS, and he shared with me his favorite story from Ukraine, that there is this amazing restaurant in Kyiv called Kanapa. It’s one of the best restaurants in eastern Europe, and it’s nearly impossible to get a reservation. If you go back and look at their reservation book for February 26, 2022, two days after the Russian invasion was initiated, you will find an entry there for a “Mr V Putin, plus one.”

Whether the story is true doesn’t really matter. It captures the psychology of a military and a political system that believed its own PowerPoint. On paper, the Russian Army was ready. Its unit status reports, top to bottom, glowed green, commanders no doubt reporting “full combat capability.” In their mind, there was no reason why Mr. Putin should not treat himself to a nice dinner out as soon as their conquest was complete.

In real life, however, after the war started on February 24, instead of enjoying fancy dinners, the Russians were trying to explain to the rest of the world why their convoys were being abandoned on highways, fuel trucks captured intact, soldiers looting gas stations for lickies and chewies. The Russians didn’t just misjudge the Ukrainians. They misjudged themselves, and this was possible only because their entire military readiness system rewarded compliance over truth.

We should take no comfort in the contrast. Our own readiness dashboards are green by default, regardless of what is happening in our motor pools or supply warehouses where Army soldiers and leaders spend more time reconciling discrepancies between systems of record and their own ground truth than they spend on the jobs they signed up to do. The U.S. Army wastes seventy million hours every year on property accountability, a ritual of counting and re-counting gear that effectively turns entire brigades into glorified supply clerks.

That is the manpower equivalent of three combat divisions doing nothing but paperwork.

The deeper problem is not effort but illusion. Ask any battalion commander what percentage of equipment statuses in G-Army are accurate. Ask a company commander how many “mission-capable” vehicles are good to go. Ask them, if we had to roll tomorrow, how many soldiers by rank and by MOS are actually deployable. You’ll get two answers: the system’s truth and the commander’s truth.

They’re both probably wrong.

Every self-styled military historian loves to remind us that wars are won by logistics. They’ll point to Alexander’s campaign in Persia, Napoleon’s failure in Russia, Hitler’s collapse on the Eastern Front, the present-day Russian invasion of Ukraine. Of course, they’re right. In the age of horses, coal, and canned food, victory went to the army that could keep its wagons moving. In the twenty-first century, we’re still running logistics like Alexander or Napoleon, managing property with handwritten notes and hope. In any near-peer conflict, we will never win by mass. Demographics are destiny, and the math is not hard. Our adversaries will always have more people, more conscripts, more matériel. Our edge will come only from time and truth, from knowing what we have, where it is, and whether it works.

Digitizing property at the edge is not a staff efficiency project. It is the single most transformative investment our military can make. Forget drones, forget AI-powered predictive maintenance and decision support, forget the next generation of long-range precision fires. Until the Army can produce accurate, real-time data about its own gear, everything else is built atop a foundation of shifting sand.

1. The Army spends seventy million hours per year to get the wrong answer

1.1. Seventy million hours cannot possibly be the number

This is not a typo. It’s not supposed to be seven million or seventy thousand. The number is seventy million, and it’s actually a pretty conservative estimate.

First, we assumed 485,000 soldiers in the Army, excluding civilians or contractors, and then we assumed that, on average, every soldier spends at least twelve hours each month on inventories and related paperwork. We know that some soldiers (e.g. 92-series, PBOs, COs and their designees) spend much more, that a change of command or “FLIPL” can chew up hundreds of hours across multiple personnel, but if we use conservative estimates and assume twelve hours per soldier per month, then in aggregate we get to seventy million hours.

Seventy million is an absurd number. If we are again conservative in our assumptions and estimate that every soldier works, on average, two thousand hours per year, then seventy million hours of productivity is the equivalent of about 35,000 full-time soldiers. To put that into context, this is the equivalent of three divisions’ worth of soldiers, all chasing hand receipts and hunting down some variation on “headset, black, miscellaneous.” It would be as if we had gone to the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne and the 10th Mountain Division and said, “Nope. You guys don’t do infantry anymore. You guys do paperwork now.”

To take it a step further, if we convert those soldier hours into dollars and, again using simple and conservative estimates, assume that every soldier costs, on average, about $55 per hour, then that seventy million hours turns into almost $4B worth of productivity. Relative to the entire defense budget, maybe $4B doesn’t seem like a lot, but our military could do a lot with that money.

With $4B I could buy almost 200 brand new UH-60M helicopters, a brand new fleet almost as large as Poland’s entire helicopter force. With $4B, I could buy about 225 M1A2 SEPv3 tanks, which would give me a more sophisticated armor fleet than the whole of Western Europe (except maybe Germany). With $4B, I could buy 23,000 GMLRS missiles, which unfortunately would take Lockheed up to two years to manufacture.

This is how much time we waste. It is existentially stupid.

1.2. Despite seventy million hours of work, the Army still can’t figure out the right answer

The worst kept secret in the United States Army is that all our systems are wrong. I served, and I knew they were wrong. Vantage is wrong. IPPS-A is wrong. GCSS-A is wrong. They’re all wrong, and everyone knows they’re wrong.

Because of this, everything the Army thinks it knows about its personnel and equipment is, at best, an educated guess and, at worst, well, an uneducated guess. The Army does not know how many soldiers it has, much less how many rifles or radios or pickup trucks. The Army does not know how many operational tanks or helicopters it has or how many fully functional HMMWVs or HIMARS platforms.

None of this is any one person’s fault or the fault of any one program. All of the systems that might help the Army with the answers are populated with bad data. Those systems don’t fail because the developers were incompetent or the vendors were crooked. Palantir, who built Vantage, probably has more engineering talent than any other company in the world. I have personally spent time with the teams at places like CACI and BAH and LockheedMartin that support programs like IPPS-A and ADVANA and SOF GLSS. These are hard-working and patriotic professionals. All of these folks are doing the best they can.

The systems fail, however, because the capabilities they are trying to deliver depend on fantasy inputs to an outdated architecture. Somehow we have yet to wrap our heads around the inescapable fact that if the data generated at the edge is wrong, then everything built on top will also be wrong. Data at the edge is wrong because those soldiers have neither the time nor the tools to enter data accurately. Because those inputs feed everything above them, every output — readiness reports, maintenance forecasts, personnel rosters — is wrong too. DPAS is wrong. LMP is wrong. LIS is wrong. If it ever gets built, EBS-C, the Army’s grand plan to unify its enterprise systems, will be wrong, too.

A monolithic architecture pumped full of bad data does not produce truth.

Now, imagine you’re a company commander. You have inherited this system, You know the systems are wrong. You know that you’ll get crushed if you report that your formation is not as “green” as it was when you took command, and, even if you were willing to assume that kind of career risk, you don’t actually have a reliable way of verifying the readiness of your own soldiers, trucks, tanks, or radios. So what do you do?

You do what commanders across the force have done for years: you game the numbers. You delay reporting a deadlined vehicle so it won’t tank your unit status report. You consolidate the order of repair parts under one serial number so the system thinks only a single tank is down, not six. You prioritize “pacer” items because the metrics overweight them, even if it means your command-and-control trucks sit broken in the motor pool. The system rewards you for paper strength, not combat strength, so that’s what you report.

Meanwhile, you and your leadership team and supply personnel have to figure out some way to document an accurate reflection of your world so that, when called upon to do the job you signed up for, you actually have a chance to make mission. This doesn’t get done with an enterprise system. It gets done with spreadsheets, three-ring binders overflowing with pdf printouts, clipboards stacked high with 2062s, handwritten notes in the margins.

When we need to know how much fuel is left, we send an E-4 with a clipboard to go inspect the blivets. When we need to know how many Patriots are left, we send another E-4 to go do a manual count because the software was never updated after we increased the capacity from four to sixteen. There are probably 1500-1800 company-sized elements in the Army. This is how logistics works in all of them.

And so we have created for ourselves this world of two truths. There is the systems truth, and then there is the observed truth. Commanders can’t admit how wide the gap has become between the systems truth and the observed truth, so they live in both worlds at once, feeding the official numbers upward while keeping a shadow version of reality on their laptops and clipboards and the little green notebooks in their cargo pockets. Over time, up and down the chain of command, those two realities diverge. The official one persists in the various systems of record — aggregated, immaculate and wrong. The observed one is messy but closer to real.

From a reporting standpoint, the delta between system truth and observed truth is why, time and again, over decades, the Department of War has never once passed a financial audit. Not once. Not ever. GAO and DoD IG reports read like a broken record:

• In 2025, GAO found that contractor-acquired property wasn’t even consistently recorded, leaving billions in gear essentially off the books (GAO-25-106868).

• In 2023, GAO reported that DoD was sitting on billions in excess, obsolete, or underutilized spare parts because the data to manage them was wrong (GAO-23-106136).

• In 2019, GAO highlighted $90B in secondary inventory plagued by mismanagement and excess stocks (GAO-19-493).

• As recently as 2024, DoD IG flagged that 23,000 pieces of government-furnished property in Kuwait were missing from Army records — not in wartime chaos, but in daily operations (DODIG-2022-106).

• Congress’s own researchers are blunt: the Department cannot credibly claim readiness while its books are so unreliable (CRS Report R46067).

The hard truth is that digitizing the edge is the only reform that makes the rest of modernization possible. By digitizing the edge, we give every company commander and supply sergeant the ability to capture accurate, real-time property data, making it easier for soldiers to do the right thing and narrowing the delta between systems truth and observed truth, rebuilding trust in the numbers that underpin readiness, maintenance, and even personnel systems. You can’t fix G-Army or IPPS-A or Vantage until you fix the data that feeds them. Another ERP won’t fix it. AI won’t fix it. Sensors won’t fix it. And without a resilient solution, the Army will continue to spend billions getting to the wrong answer more quickly.

Aside from the audit question, the real-world implications of these two truths are much more dangerous. The tragedy is that we plan wars based on the first while relying on the second to win them and come home. We are the finest fighting force in the world — and it’s not particularly close — and we keep track of our gear with color-coded highlighters and sticky notes. We do not actually know how bad it is, how big the delta is between those truths, and history suggests we won’t know until it’s too late.

Before Russia rolled into Ukraine, its own army almost certainly looked “green” across the board on readiness reports. On paper, brigades were no doubt full, tanks operational, all units ready to march on Kyiv. When the fighting started, however, the façade shattered. Vehicles broke down on the march, logistics trains froze on the highways, soldiers abandoned equipment that was either not operational or not maintainable or both. Commanders discovered that the rosy projections in their readiness reports bore no resemblance whatsoever to the truth on the ground.

We love to point to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a kind of exemplar for how an overmatched, outgunned, outnumbered fighting force might make a stand against a superior formation. Our soldiers are far better trained, far more well-equipped than the Ukrainians. When it comes to supply and logistics, however, we are much more like the Russians than we would care to admit.

“Green” on a unit status report does not mean green in real life. It means that a salty old E7 helped a wet-behind-the-ears O1 figure out how to do the paperwork correctly. Paper readiness rewards deception; real readiness rewards honesty. Ignoring ugly truths around poor leadership and a culture of fear, what happens when militaries believe their own spreadsheets? Russia did, right up until they didn’t.

2. When the tail wags the tooth, Army culture dies

2.1 When the tail wags the tooth, lethality becomes an afterthought

I applaud the extent to which the current administration has made a priority of re-establishing fundamental lethality as the cornerstone of Army culture.

The Pentagon loves the word. Everything is supposed to make the force “more lethal.” Ask five generals to define it and you’ll get ten answers. Here’s one that works: lethality is the ability of a unit to close with and destroy the enemy.

To oversimplify, that requires three main ingredients:

• Manpower in the right mix. Combat arms, not cooks or clerks.

• Training time. On the range and in the field, not PowerPoints and Excel.

• Equipment that actually works. Green in the motor pool, not just in Vantage.

By that definition, seventy million wasted hours a year isn’t an inefficiency. It is corrosion, rot, a withering away.

Every hour spent chasing a hand receipt is an hour not spent on mission training. A rifle company burning a week reconciling radios and NVGs isn’t on the range. An aviation battalion tied up closing out ULLS-A maintenance actions isn’t flying. A reconnaissance troop scrambling to meet a Unit Status Report window isn’t rehearsing scout-screen maneuvers, conducting weapons qualifications, or holding live-fire exercises. Give the force those hours back and you buy millions of extra reps, miles run and doors kicked and rounds downrange. Instead, we funnel that time into three-ring binders and manila folders.

Even the Army’s premier training events have become hostage to the same dynamic. A Combat Training Center rotation — JRTC in Louisiana, NTC in California, or JMRC in Germany — is supposed to be the pinnacle of collective training: the place where a brigade tests itself against a thinking enemy under field conditions. In practice, getting there is half the battle. Units spend months closing maintenance faults, reconciling property books, and clearing digital discrepancies before they can even load a vehicle on a rail car. Commanders joke that the hardest part of JRTC isn’t fighting “in the box,” but rather surviving the paperwork that gets you there.

The irony is that the Army’s best warfighting exercise has become a year-long administrative marathon ending in a four-week sprint. A brigade might spend six months preparing for thirty days of fighting. The bureaucracy surrounding readiness has swallowed the practice of readiness itself. We’ve built a system where we train harder to report readiness than to achieve it.

And that’s only the visible cost. The invisible cost is the quiet re-engineering of the force itself around administrative maintenance. The Department’s acquisition and contracting workforce now tops 150,000, while the Army and Marine Corps together probably field only about 75,000 infantry soldiers — the people who actually close with and destroy the enemy. Within the Army, roughly one in five active-duty soldiers serves in a logistics or administrative billet. Comparable commercial supply-chain organizations operate with 5–10 percent of headcount in back-office functions; ours runs closer to 25 percent.

The inefficiency is not confined to the uniformed ranks. Behind every rifle company stands a bureaucracy that dwarfs it. DoD employs about 760,000 civilians and contracts with another 700,000 private workers — nearly one for every active-duty service member. The Army’s G-1 data show the civilian back office has grown 25 percent since 2001 while active-duty end strength shrank 7 percent. We are literally adding managers while losing fighters.

And the architecture keeps metastasizing. The 2,300-system tangle identified in 2018 has barely shrunk, even after billions poured into consolidation efforts. Since 2017 the Department has spent another $5 billion on “audit readiness,” still failing every audit. Up to forty percent of the budget now goes to management and support — a larger share than in the years after 9/11 when the Army was fighting two wars. A bureaucracy this large doesn’t serve warfighters; it exists to feed itself.

Training calendars tell the same story. RAND’s Non-Deployable Time and Administrative Burden in the U.S. Army found that company-grade officers spend 40–60 percent of the work week on administrative tasks instead of tactical leadership. GAO’s Army Readiness: Better Measures Needed estimated that inventories and reconciliations cost units three to five training days per quarter. A 2023 DoD IG audit determined that one in four administrative hours is consumed re-entering the same data into multiple systems. Even the best-run battalions are losing the equivalent of a full month of training every year just to remain compliant.

This isn’t lethality. It’s bureaucracy wearing camouflage. When we tell soldiers their mission is to win wars but structure their workdays like a regional insurance office, the outcome is predictable: training time collapses, initiative withers, and the sharp edge of the force dulls itself on its own paperwork.

2.2 When Lethality becomes an afterthought, culture erodes from within

All that wasted time doesn’t just dull readiness. It changes what the Army values. When the calendar fills with compliance tasks, the culture follows.

Every wasted hour comes out of someone’s hide. Soldiers join to shoot, fly, drive, and fight, not to chase signatures on DA 2062s. When they spend weekends reconciling spreadsheets instead of training or seeing family, they don’t re-enlist. When commanders are judged on compliance rather than competence, they stop telling the truth about readiness. That’s how a bureaucracy eats a profession.

The results are visible in recruiting and retention. The Army has missed its recruiting goal by about 15,000 soldiers two years in a row, lowering future targets just to preserve appearances. Voluntary separations are up 14 percent in three years, and retention among mid-career NCOs is down roughly 10 percent since 2019. The service’s own Why They Leave survey lists the culprits: administrative burden, lack of meaningful work, poor work-life balance, and loss of trust in leadership. RAND’s officer-retention studies reach the same conclusion, that officers are leaving not because they fear real combat but because they’re exhausted by clerical combat.

Trust in leadership is eroding just as fast. Army climate surveys show confidence in senior leaders has fallen from around 65 percent a decade ago to barely 50 percent today. Less than half of enlisted soldiers believe their feedback leads to change, and 41 percent think favoritism or politics influence promotions more than merit. Bureaucracy doesn’t just waste time. It teaches people that honesty is dangerous and that merit is irrelevant.

Administrative drag has become a health hazard. The average soldier works 59–63 hours a week, according to RAND’s Soldier Tempo and Fatigue study, much of it on non-mission tasks. The Army’s risk-reduction reports show over 60 percent of soldiers reporting chronic fatigue or lack of sleep tied to administrative workload. The Army’s suicide rate sits around 36 per 100,000 — more than twice the civilian average — and the Health Promotion Office cites workload and loss of purpose among the top stressors. This is what happens when lethality becomes an afterthought: people stop seeing the point.

The Army is supposed to be hard. We all signed up for hard. A lot of us also signed up precisely because we did not want a job driving a desk, and in this context, when we ask soldiers in survey after survey why they got out, they do not complain that the job itself was hard but rather point to meaningless work and loss of trust as their reasons for leaving. When lethality becomes an afterthought, paperwork becomes the profession. When paperwork becomes the profession, the best people walk. A trained NCO can earn more managing logistics for Amazon, and no one there asks him to enter the same data three times in three different systems.

This is not a culture problem that can be fixed with slogans or leadership summits. It’s a design problem. The systems that govern daily life — G-Army, IPPS-A, Vantage — are built to reward box-checking and punish initiative. They make truth-telling career risk and self-deception career insurance. The longer we tolerate that, the less lethal we become.

When lethality becomes an afterthought, culture dies. And once culture dies, no amount of money, technology, or motivational posters will bring it back. What will bring it back is something simpler and far harder: respecting the soldier’s time. A nation that values its soldiers’ lives enough to send them to war should value their hours enough not to waste them.

3. How to add five divisions of tooth without recruiting a single new soldier

The reforms that matter most aren’t new weapons or doctrines. They’re the ones that give time back to soldiers and truth back to commanders. The math is not hard. The Army maintains an entire MOS series (the 92-series logisticians, property book officers, and supply clerks) whose work keeps the enterprise moving. These are capable, professional soldiers who do exactly what we ask of them. The problem isn’t them; it’s that we need far more of them than we should. In a digital logistics system, a supply section of five could do the work that today requires twenty. The payoff isn’t saving soldiers from their jobs. Rather, it’s redistributing billets to point those soldiers toward combat arms.

Right now, roughly 8 percent of the active Army, about 35,000 billets, is dedicated to logistics accounting and property management. If automation and edge-level digitization reduced that demand by even 80 percent, the Army could reassign nearly 28,000 soldiers to fighting formations. Add the 70 million hours now lost each year to manual inventory work — the equivalent of 35,000 full-time soldiers — and you recover about 63,000 soldier-equivalents of combat power: four to five divisions.

No new recruits. No new bases. Just truth and time returned to the force.

That kind of gain is not a thought experiment — it’s the scale of advantage the United States will need to stay credible against nations that win by mass. China’s People’s Liberation Army fields nearly a million ground troops and adds another 700,000 paramilitary reservists. Russia’s ground force, even after losses in Ukraine, numbers more than half a million. The active U.S. Army sits just under 450,000. We will never win a headcount competition. Our edge has always been time to truth — the speed with which we can sense, decide, and act. Currently, however, our only digital advantage over the Wehrmacht is Microsoft Excel. Excel was written in 1985.

Whatever advantages we have historically enjoyed are shrinking. Today, DoD’s own Joint All-Domain C2 assessments put our logistics-data latency — the time between an event in the field and its reflection in a system — at hours to days. The target is seconds. Each day of lag is a day of lost deterrence. A near-peer who can see real readiness faster will always decide faster. If digitizing property at the edge cuts that latency by even one order of magnitude, it’s worth a hundred new aircraft.

The opportunity cost is visible in training and sustainment. A typical Brigade Combat Team logs 18–20 training days per quarter. RAND’s analysis shows that inventories and administrative cycles erase three to five of those days. Reclaiming that time across the force is the equivalent of adding an extra month of live-fire training every year — without extending deployments or raising costs. Multiply that across 31 BCTs and you buy back the combat proficiency of a small army.

Digitizing the edge does more than make the Army faster; it makes modernization coherent. Every major investment we’re betting on — AI, autonomy, precision fires, even recruiting analytics — depends on clean, timely data. You can’t build intelligent logistics on dumb inputs. Fix the edge first, and every subsequent technology starts working as advertised. Ignore it, and we’ll keep spending billions to get the wrong answer faster.

The math is simple. The imperative is not. Eliminating analog property processes and automating the bulk of logistics billets yields roughly 63,000 soldier-equivalents of combat power, five divisions’ worth of readiness, deterrence, and depth. It is the cheapest, fastest way to strengthen the Army and, by extension, the credibility of American power.

Time and truth

In 2022, Russia booked its reservation in Kyiv because it believed its own slides. We don’t need to make the same mistake to share the same weakness. Every “green” dashboard, every spreadsheet that passes for truth, pushes us a little closer to our own Kanapa moment.

Time and truth are the only advantages that scale without cost. Every hour we give back to a soldier compounds in training, retention, and deterrence. Every byte of accurate data multiplies the value of every other system we own. Digitizing logistics isn’t a staff reform; it’s how the United States preserves the edge that has defined its military for seventy-five years.

Wars have always been won by logistics, but not by this kind of logistics. Alexander marched on foot. Napoleon rode horses. Hitler relied on rail. We rely on Excel. Excel is brilliant software, but it’s forty years old. If that remains the backbone of the most sophisticated army in history, we have confused automation with transformation.

A spreadsheet is not a strategy.

Our adversaries will always have us outnumbered. Our advantage has to be precision — knowing, faster and more accurately than anyone else, what we have and where it is. In the industrial age, armies maneuvered across geography. In the information age, they maneuver across time. The decisive movement today is not the speed of a tank but the speed of truth — how quickly accurate data moves through the force. Awareness — the ability to move truth faster than the enemy — has become the twenty-first-century form of maneuver. That awareness turns information into lethality.

Digitizing property at the edge isn’t glamorous, but it’s decisive. It frees commanders to train, maintain, and fight instead of reconcile. It ensures that readiness slides finally match the motor pool. No ERP, no AI, no sensor network or precision weapon can deliver greater or faster return on investment, because every one of them still depends on the quality of the data beneath it. Fix the edge first, and everything else starts working as advertised. Ignore it, and we’ll keep spending billions to get the wrong answer faster. Done right, digitizing the edge guarantees that the next war, when it comes, will be won by soldiers, not lost in spreadsheets¹.

Further Reading & Source Notes

Army Policy and Modernization Efforts

• “Modernization: Out with the Old, In with the New,” Army.mil (Jan 2024)
  Gen. Randy George tasked Army Materiel Command to make the removal of excess and unused equipment more efficient. The Rapid Removal of Excess (R2E) program aims to reduce property burdens and simplify accountability, though it does not quantify the labor cost of current practices.

• “I Corps Reduces Property Demand on Units” (Army.mil, Jun 2024)
  Details how units turned in thousands of excess items under the R2E initiative to relieve “inventory, maintenance, and accountability management demands.” Illustrates the systemic appetite to offload inventory that the current system cannot manage efficiently.

• SMA Michael Weimer, “Focused on Fundamentals” (AUSA, Oct 2023)
  Emphasizes “brilliance at the basics,” supply discipline, and accountability as readiness fundamentals. Useful context for the Army’s current cultural narrative around property discipline, but no quantitative analysis of administrative cost.

• “Leadership Training Gaps in Property Accountability,” Army Sustainment (2016)
  Notes that many junior officers outside logistics branches receive minimal formal training in property accountability. Highlights the complexity and risk of current processes at the company level

• “Company Commanders’ Property Books Have Significantly Grown Over the Past 20 Years,” Duke Sanford School, Jnah-FSRP Field Study (2023)
  Quotes senior leaders acknowledging the exponential growth of property-book burdens at the company level. Provides qualitative support for the claim that analog accountability drains unit focus.

• Command Supply Discipline Program (Lessons Learned / Army Manual)
  Explains the regulatory inventory cycles (change of PHRH, annual, sensitive items) that drive recurring administrative load. Useful for understanding the mandatory compliance that underpins the 70-million-hour estimate.

• “Understanding DA 2062: Guide to Military Equipment Accountability,” Business Money (2024)
  Describes DA Form 2062 as the foundation of Army property control through hand receipts and annexes. Process overview but lacks quantification of time or productivity cost.

• “The Importance of Keeping Track,” PEO IEW&S (2017)
  Addresses systemic weaknesses in property accountability and audit preparation, reinforcing that the issue is acknowledged but under-measured.

Government Accountability Office (GAO) & Inspector General Reports

• GAO-25-106868 (2025): DoD Financial Management – Greater Accountability Needed over Contractor-Acquired Property
  Finds that billions in contractor-acquired property remain unrecorded or inconsistently tracked—direct evidence of “ground truth” and “systems truth” divergence.

• GAO-23-106136 (2023): Defense Supply Chain – DoD Needs Better Information to Manage Spare Parts
  Estimates billions in spare parts stored as excess, obsolete, or underutilized inventory due to inaccurate data—supports 5–10% waste assumption.

• GAO-19-493 (2019): DoD Inventory Management – Improved Policies Needed to Address Deficiencies
  Identifies $90 billion in secondary inventory mismanagement, a key precedent for the $35 billion Army waste anchor.

• DoDIG-2022-106 (2024): Audit of Army Government-Furnished Property in Kuwait
  Reports 23,000 missing items in Army records—illustrates that accountability failures occur in routine operations, not just combat.

• Congressional Research Service R46067 (2019): Defense Primer – Audit of the Department of Defense
  Summarizes DoD’s decades-long inability to achieve a clean audit opinion; confirms the persistent data-integrity problem.

• GAO Testimony, “DoD Audit Progress and Challenges” (2023)
  Notes that DoD has spent over $5 billion since 2017 on audit-readiness with little measurable progress.

RAND Corporation Studies

• “Non-Deployable Time and Administrative Burden in the U.S. Army” (2018)
  Finds company-grade officers spend 40–60% of their time on administrative tasks. Foundation for the “training time lost” argument.

• “Soldier Tempo and Fatigue: Understanding Non-Mission Workload” (2019)
  Reports average soldier workweeks of 59–63 hours, much of it consumed by non-mission tasks; links administrative overload to fatigue and morale.

• “Officer Retention and Talent Management” (2022)
  Identifies “bureaucratic culture” and “lack of autonomy” as top reasons officers exit before 10 years of service.

• “Army Command Climate and Leadership Trends” (2023)
  Provides survey data showing 40–50% of enlisted soldiers have low confidence in leadership responsiveness.

Department of Defense & Congressional Data

• DoD Acquisition Workforce Human Capital Initiatives (AWF-HCI) Annual Report (2023)
  Documents ~150,000 acquisition professionals, double the number of infantry soldiers across the Army and Marine Corps combined.

• OSD Personnel & Readiness, DoD Civilian Workforce Statistics (FY2023)
  Confirms ~760,000 civilians employed by DoD—nearly one for every active-duty service member.

• CRS “Department of Defense Contractor and Civilian Workforce” (2022)
  Estimates ~700,000 contractors supporting DoD; validates the “one-for-one” uniform-to-civilian ratio.

• DoD Comptroller, FY2024 Budget Overview
  Shows 36% of the base budget devoted to management and support activities—evidence of back-office expansion.

• 2018 NDAA Section 912 Report
  Identifies 2,300+ business and logistics IT systems across DoD; foundational for the duplication argument.

Retention, Morale, and Health

• Army People Strategy, “Why They Leave” Survey (2023)
  Lists top separation reasons: administrative burden, lack of meaningful work, poor work-life balance, and declining trust in leadership.

• Army Risk Reduction and Health Promotion Report (2022)
  Finds over 60% of soldiers report chronic fatigue or lack of sleep linked to workload; cites loss of purpose as a top stressor.

• DoD Annual Suicide Report (2023)
  Army suicide rate ~36 per 100,000, double the civilian average; identifies workload and institutional stress as major contributors.

• Army Climate and Safety Survey (2022)
  Shows confidence in senior leadership has dropped from 65% (2014) to ≈50% (2022); fewer than half of enlisted believe feedback leads to change.

Comparative & Industry Benchmarks

• McKinsey Global Institute, “Automation in Defense” (2021)
  Estimates 20–40% efficiency gains from digitizing repetitive administrative tasks—validates automation ROI assumptions.

• IISS The Military Balance 2024
  Provides comparative force sizes: PLA ≈ 975 K ground troops; Russian Army ≈ 550 K; U.S. Army ≈ 445 K—context for “mass vs. time-to-truth” argument.

• CSIS, “Defense Industrial Workforce and Competitiveness” (2023)
  Notes U.S. defense-industrial workforce ≈ 1.1 M vs China’s > 7 M—underscores need to extract more combat power per soldier.

• GAO-24-210, Army Training Readiness (2024)
  Finds typical BCT averages 18–20 training days per quarter, with administrative cycles eroding 3–5 days—used in Section 3.

• McKinsey Global Institute & DoD JADC2 Assessments (2022)
  Highlight that current logistics data latency is measured in hours to days; modernization goal is seconds—basis for “awareness as maneuver” framing.

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