The Importance of Safety and Security Measures
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The Importance of Safety and Security Measures
Security is absolutely vital to the overall operation of any logistics. Missions more than likely will fail without securities. When I was deployed in Iraq 2007 to COB Speicher, in order for farmers, drivers, and local nationals being able to deliver their products to support the military operations on base, the military had to provide convoys to incoming truck loads delivering fuel, water, and spare parts. Depending on the level of importance for a particular item, its high value sensitive classified equipment/parts would require top priority security. In order to have a list of inventories or spare parts in stock, especially in a combat zone, those spare parts would need to be delivered on base, goes through difficult convoys from Kuwait to Iraq exposing to terrorist attacks, like ambush and IEDs. Once the spare parts has been delivered on base, soldiers are required to pull security 24/7 every day. Spare parts within an inventory usually are based upon whether it is being use for schedule or unscheduled maintenance.
The U.S military presence in Iraq today have strong warehouses of many additional spare parts from inventories, compare to the initial phase of the war, security was a major problem in Iraq, suicide bombers and constant terrorist attacks of shooting mortars at U.S military bases. The availability of spare parts in a combat zone is always kept at highest priority due to the nature of excessive long hours of operations and break down, which requires constant maintenance support and test equipments; according to Blanchard (2004), “In general, as the reliability of a system increases, the frequency of maintenance will decrease and, conversely, the frequency of maintenance will increase as system reliability is degraded” (p. 47).
Transportation has a huge impact to availability and quantities; let us think of Wal-Mart or HEB for an example. Those vendors usually receive their bulk shipment at night and then stock it when the store is close or have few customers. Drivers can stay more focus on the road because of fewer distractions versus day time, also the transit time for deliveries are faster, better and can mitigate the risk of traffic and accidents. Imagine during the day with heavy traffic lines, the time it required to load, unload and then drive through stations and destinations will affect the overall item turnaround time. But in a combat zone like Iraq, there is no freedom of movement even at night, military convoys are always prone to potential threats and danger, and must be armed at all times in case of an ambush or an IED attack. So the level of protection or safety measures is low in the states and extremely high in Iraq. Safety and security is considered to be the highest priority in Iraq and in the states, if for any reasons if transportation has issues during delivery, ranging from accidents to threats