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The Army cannot deploy its full force structure within a short period

• Currently, the Army funds sustainment of medical materiel readiness to a level that supports less than 33 percent of Army units with the ability to deploy rapidly. The deficit is most acute for brigade combat teams (BCTs), for which the only centrally managed medical supplies are in Army Pre-Positioned Stocks.
• By shifting the current resources available for medical materiel sustainment to support deployment readiness, up to 40 percent of units in the force structure can be made ready to deploy rapidly.

Equipping units with medical materiel is a costly requirement for the Army

• Annual costs to sustain expiring shelf-life items are about $1 million to $2 million per unit.
• Even with deferred procurement, the Army still faces a large annual cost to sustain updated medical materiel — a cost its current expenditures might not be covering.

The Army can rely on a strategy of prepositioning equipment and shelf-life items to reduce deployment time lines

• A unit with equipment and shelf-life items either prepositioned or ready for immediate shipment from the contiguous United States (CONUS) could deploy within 30 days.
• A unit with equipment and shelf-life items that are immediately accessible in CONUS could deploy in 60 days.
• A unit with equipment immediately accessible in CONUS but needing to buy shelf-life items could deploy in 90 days.
• Units needing to buy both equipment and shelf-life items would need more than 120 days to deploy.

Faced with budgetary constraints, the U.S. Army must decide how to best invest for readiness. It cannot afford to modernize all units with current medical equipment and sustain all units with consumable medical items at all times. To help the Army consider how best to invest in medical materiel equipping, the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Agency (USAMMA) asked RAND Arroyo Center to survey medical materiel owned by the Army, procurement and fielding costs for it, alternative supply options, and the effect that alternative options would have on capabilities and risk. This report summarizes this requested analysis. Specifically, this report describes the current Army medical materiel strategy, equipping costs, readiness levels, and recommendations for optimizing the Army medical materiel strategy.

The purpose of the project was to update the current Army Medical Department equipping strategy to optimize medical readiness by most effectively equipping the operational medical force in support of global contingency missions in a limited resource environment. Ensuring that more units have medical equipment to deploy more rapidly would require more funds from the Army or a shift in the way that available funds are applied.

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