U.S. Army/Staff Sgt.

Todd Pouliot

Re-greening
Of Aviation
Maintenance

48

ARMY April 2014

U.S. Army/Sgt. 1st Class Kelly Jo Bridgwater

he commanding general of U.S. Army Aviation and

Missile Command is advocating what he calls regreening of maintenance: to have soldiers replace
civilian contractors. This will be a gradual transition, Maj. Gen. Lynn A. Collyar said in an interview. We
will continually work with the contractors we have to decrease them and increase the number of green-suiters.
His immediate effort is aimed at retraining roughly 2,500
soldiers at the rank of sergeant and below who are involved
in aviation maintenance, but it would also apply to other
maintenance specialists whose skills may have eroded from
a decade of deployments. Collyar said he sees this as a way
to prepare for a future of tighter Army budgets: With the
fiscal situation that we have, we have to get everybody that
we employ fully engaged and fully productive.
The initiative could start this year, he said, acknowledging there is still turmoil from deployments. There will remain a significant amount of aviation assets in the theater
until the very end, he said, referring to the Armys
Afghanistan mission. Collyar estimates it will take two
years from the end of the mission to get all of the aviation
assets back to the United States and processed through depots for major overhauls and minor repairs. That needs to
be done, he said, so we dont give units more maintenance
than they could normally handle because of the wear and
tear that has been put on helicopters.
In 12 years of war, Collyar said, deploying units left behind helicopters and other equipment that needed maintenance at their home bases, while falling in on equipment in
the war zone. This resulted in maintenance needs in the
states and overseas, as deployed soldiers often faced a
maintenance task bigger than they could handle. The operating tempo and heavy flying hours resulted in the need for
more maintenance than Army units could do on their own,
requiring increased reliance on contractors, Collyar said.
With deployments winding down and military budgets
dropping, Collyar wants soldiers to replace some of the con-

tractors. We have to get the green-suiters back doing the

things they have been trained in the schools to do. [They]
have been doing a lot of other things in the last few years and
havent gotten the growth and experience we would like.
They have not been doing maintenance because they
have been flying more hours and pulling security and convoy duties, he said. In some cases, he said, units were assigned to four different locations, each of which needed its
own maintenance staff. The tables of organization and
equipment for operational units did not provide enough
people.

Alaska National Guard/Staff Sgt. Karima Turner

U.S. Army/Capt. Chad Ashe

Clockwise from above: Spc. Amber Hillman of the Alaska Army

National Guard performs preventive maintenance on the tail
wheel of a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter; Staff Sgt. Patrick Jubrey
of the California Army National Guard repairs sheet metal inside
a UH-60 Black Hawk; Initial Military Training students attend the
Utility Helicopter Repairer course at Joint Base Langley-Eustis,
Va.; Sgt. Andrew Gage, left, and Sgt. 1st Class Corey Shelton of
the 10th Combat Aviation Brigade reinstall the forward cowling on
an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter in Afghanistan.

The result was that contractors were doing more maintenance while the skills of soldiers who had trained in
maintenance eroded, he said. How much those skills
eroded depended on their duties during deployment:
There are people who have deployed multiple times who
have actually done maintenance jobs their entire time
there. Their proficiency is better than the average person
we have ever had before, Collyar said. There are other
people, though, who didnt get to do that, or who didnt
get to work on different models and design of aircraft. We
have to get them back to the totality of what their military

occupational specialty is supposed to cover, he said.

This does not mean contractors will be banished from
hangars, he said. He has no plans to suddenly announce it is
time for all contractors to leave. We always had contractors
in our motor pools, he said, using the term motor pool to include hangars and other maintenance areas. That is not the
issue. When we get to an end state here, we will still have
contractors in our motor pools to facilitate capability. They
will continue to do what they are doing, but we will have
some of our green-suiters work side by side with those people to relearn those skills and to get additional experience
working side by side with the people who have been doing
[the work]. Then, we gradually take over from there.
Collyar believes that having soldiers and civilians working side by side will provide an opportunity to assess who
needs refresher training and in what specific areas they need
help. You can see where their skills are and where they are
not if you have other people working there with them.
Noncommissioned officers also could receive some training in schools, Collyar said. He is also interested in reviving
an abandoned program in which soldiers kept a log of
which maintenance skills they had mastered and when
they received retraining. This would provide an easily understood assessment of who needs what training, he said.
While he is responsible for aviation maintenance, Collyar said the same initiative would apply to other maintenance skills.
Staff Report
April 2014 ARMY 49