Sustaining The Military Enterprise

Military supply chains are unique because what is supplied to the end user is routinely returned to the supply chain for maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO). Offering a blueprint for transforming military depot workload and processes into those of high-performance commercial facilities, Enterprise Sustainability: Enhancing the Military‘s Abilit

The U.S. government mandates that all Department of Defense logistic-wide initiatives adopt commercially proven practices and strategies to undergo maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) transformations. Reasons for the drastic order include aging weapons systems, an aging workforce, limited financial resources, and new technologies, just to name

Sustainability and sustainable development have become popular goals. They have also become wide-ranging terms that can be applied to any entity or enterprise on a local or a global scale for long time periods. As enterprises and systems become more complex and development a support costs increase, the question remains: how does one engineer an enterprise or a product for sustainability? Engineering for Sustainability provide common sense information for engineering, planning, and carrying out those tasks needed to sustain military products and services and, in turn, the entire enterprise. This book tackles the problem from the top down, beginning with discussions on planning initiatives and implementing sustainable activities. It outlines a series of principles to help engineers design products and services to meet customer and societal needs with minimal impact on resources and the ecosystem. Using examples and case studies from the government, military, academia, and commercial enterprises, the authors provide a set of tools for long-term sustainability and explain how an entire enterprise can be engineered to sustain itself. Achieving the high levels of sustainability needed in complex military and industrial systems is too often an elusive goal. Competing rules and regulations, conflicting goals and performance metrics, the desire to incorporate promising commercial off-the-shelf technologies, and the pressures of maintenance schedules contribute to this elusiveness. This book provides an analysis of and prescription for the strategies, principles, and technologies necessary to sustain the military and the systems it develops and uses. This can then be used to make any enterprise more efficient and cost effective in a changing environment.

In this book, historians of technology bring their special expertise to probing the influence of the military on technological development over a broad range of history and in a variety of cases.

This book offers a substantial reconsideration of early modern warfare and its relationship to the power of the state.

This is a major new approach to the military revolution and the relationship between warfare and the power of the state in early modern Europe. Whereas previous accounts have emphasised the growth of state-run armies during this period, David Parrott argues instead that the delegation of military responsibility to sophisticated and extensive networks of private enterprise reached unprecedented levels. This included not only the hiring of troops but their equipping, the supply of food and munitions, and the financing of their operations. The book reveals the extraordinary prevalence and capability of private networks of commanders, suppliers, merchants and financiers who managed the conduct of war on land and at sea, challenging the traditional assumption that reliance on mercenaries and the private sector results in corrupt and inefficient military force. In so doing, the book provides essential historical context to contemporary debates about the role of the private sector in warfare.