The War on Excess: The Army Has an Equipment Management Problem and Needs a Culture Change to Solve It

Ian W. Black and William Parker

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Excess equipment is an albatross hanging from the Army’s neck. Two decades of conflict, increasing operational requirements since the end of the post-9/11 wars, and lack of placing mundane requirements on training plans has left the service with a severe problem: too much stuff, too often in the wrong places. Worse, given changes in the Army’s equipment transfer standard policy, excess problems may mutate into decreased equipment readiness due to increases in unforeseen maintenance costs. Efforts over the years to address the issue—with Unit Equipping and Reuse Working Groups, for example, and All Army Excess Campaign Plan—have been unable to make progress toward solving the problem. The latest effort, Rapid Removal of Excess (R2E), is in its nascent stages. But applying new practices to the same problem without addressing why the excess problem occurs will only lead to more rounds of R2E-like programs. R2E isn’t the answer; culture change is.

On April 27, 2021, the Senate Committee on Armed Services received testimony from leading authorities on management challenges and opportunities within the Department of Defense. Among the three witnesses, Dr. Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and tenured professor at the Wharton School of Business, provided particularly candid insights. “I worry that DoD culture is a threat to national security,” he told members of the committee.