Defense logistics agency issue - KMI Media Group

At first glance, the containers used to ship
military equipment and supplies around the
world appear not to have changed much over
the past half-century. Walk into any shipyard
and the same cranes seem to be moving the
same containers they moved roughly 60 years
ago when container sizes became standardized
worldwide.
A closer look, however, will reveal some
significant evolutions in these containers as
well as in the hard cases used to transport
everything from weapons and electronics
to medical supplies. Many of them have
chemical agent resistant coatings on them.
A growing number have electromagnetic
interference (EMI)/radio frequency interference
(RFI) protection to keep signals from
emanating outside or coming into the container.
Some have been cleverly engineered
into energy-efficient shelters while others,
through high-tech GPS tags, can be tracked
and inventoried anywhere in the world.
As of May 2012, the Department of
Defense owned 333,486 registered containers,
according to the Military Surface Deployment
and Distribution Command’s (SDDC)
Global Container Management (GCM)
branch. Between 7,000 and 10,000 of that
total were added in the last five years. Just
under half the total inventory is comprised of
the 20-foot container, by far the most common
container in the system.
“The 20-foot container is number one
because of its ease of use,” said Thomas
Catchings, programs, systems and training
lead for SDDC’s GCM branch. “It can be
moved by a large or small element. You can
stack them, you can put them on a truck.
When we ship equipment overseas, once the
20-foot container gets there, it can be used
for force protection, for storage and more.
That kind of agility is what we’re looking for.”
GCM is currently working with other
military organizations to create a comprehensive,
single-source solution for tracking
how packages, cases and shipping
containers are evoLving in today’s
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By heather BaLdwin
mLf correspondent
all containers in the DoD system throughout
their life cycles, from procurement to
disposal. “It will be a system for anyone in
DoD to go into and have total visibility on
a container—where it is, the maintenance
cycle, the money owed on it,” said Catchings.
“Today, we have different buckets for all that
information with different people covering
different lanes throughout the container life
cycle.” Catchings expects funding for this
program to begin flowing in fiscal year 2013.
The complexities of creating such a system
are apparent when one considers the
overwhelming number of variables in today’s
container designs. Sea Box Inc., for instance,
currently offers hundreds of designs and is
adding three or four new ones every week in
response to customer requests, said Sea Box
President Jim Brennan.
While most of these designs are one-time
custom builds, Brennan has observed several
overarching trends, mostly related to the
military’s efforts to go green. For instance,
sandwich panel construction is increasingly
popular. Unlike corrugated steel, sandwich
paneling is built using multiple layers of
foam, fiberglass and other insulating materials
bonded together. “It’s equally as strong as
corrugated, but it’s insulated,” said Brennan.
“So you can get more insulation in the same
amount of space [as corrugated], or you can
get the same insulation in less space. You then
use less energy and that’s the trend—moving
toward more energy efficiency.”
A similar shift is occurring in the area of
insulating paint, which uses thermally reflective
materials to reduce heat transfer through
the coating, thereby reducing the energy
needed to cool a container’s interior. Sea Box
has offered this option for about five years but
only recently has Brennan noticed an uptick
in interest. “It’s been growing slowly because
it’s expensive,” he said, “but people are starting
to look more at their total energy life cycle
costs and the reflective paint reduces those
costs over the long term.”
In response to the U.S. Army’s efforts
to reduce energy usage housing soldiers in
Afghanistan and elsewhere, Sea Box recently
rolled out the Collapsible Re-deployable Shelter
(CRS). The CRS is built from a shipping
container with high-grade insulation in the
walls and roof. It includes LED lighting and
an electrical package, and it collapses to 2 feet
in height for shipping. When four collapsed
shelters are stacked, they are the same size
and shape as a standard cargo container, making
them easy to move via ship, truck and rail.
The Army recently finished six months of
testing the CRS and other similar solutions at
Fort Devens, Mass. Brennan anticipates the
written results of that testing to be delivered
in June. In the meantime, a major defense
contractor just ordered a CRS complex with
EMI shielding. “EMI-shielded collapsible shelters
are brand new,” said Brennan, adding that
the shelter will be complete by August.
“More customers are asking for EMI/
RFI shielding and chem/bio features,” echoed
Jason Raffaele, director of engineering at AAR
Mobility Systems. “Our customers are putting
more people and electronics in shelters
deployed to austere environments, requiring
ever-increasing cooling capacity and dehumidification.”
AAR Mobility Systems traces its history of
providing turn-key mobility and sustainment
solutions to 1963 when it began manufacturing
aluminum cargo pallets for the U.S.
Air Force. Today, it continues to support the
defense marketplace via the prototype, design,
manufacture, integration and life cycle support
of a wide variety of shelters, containers,
CROPs and flat racks, pallets and palletized
systems, and integrated platforms.
Beyond the growing number of requests
for EMI/RFI shielding, Raffaele said the military
is placing increased emphasis on weight
and energy efficiency. “Lighter systems mean
more payload and less fuel,” explained Mark
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