CAMP TAJI, Iraq - The 4th Sustainment Brigade at Camp Taji recently assisted in the turn-in of more than 900 pieces of retrograde military equipment in only six days.
This equipment is being turned in as part of a theater-wide battlefield-cleansing initiative.
The equipment belonged to 1st Brigade Combat Team and the Combat Aviation Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division.
"The 4th Sustainment Brigade was notified about this mission about two weeks before the operations at the Central Receiving and Shipping Point (CRSP) yard began," said Maj. Jared Longfield, 4th SB S-4.
The brigade had to coordinate with the Army Materiel Command's (AMC) Retrograde Property Accountability Team (RPAT), participating units and the CRSP yard, which is run by the 115th Cargo Transfer Company and falls under the 4th SB.
"This is the first large-scale Class VII operation the yard has participated in," said 1st Lt. Andrew W. Colsia, the CRSP yard OIC. "It was just recently turned into a CRSP yard from a distribution center."
During normal operations, the yard processes 20 to 25 vehicles a week but during the retrograde mission, they processed around 150 vehicles.
"My Soldiers are definitely doing a good job taking on this theater-level mission," Colsia said. "It is sometimes hard for Soldiers to see the bigger picture, but I think my guys have a really good concept on that and they are willing to take on any mission no matter how big it is."
The 4th Inf. Div. units, who until recently owned the equipment, were told about the retrograde mission a month ago, said Maj. Michael J. Best, the S-4 of the CAB, 4th Inf. Div.
"We started putting our plan together from there, and did our analysis on which vehicles we need to be able to sustain."
The vehicles that are sent back do not meet theater armor requirements; many are still canvas-tops with no armor at all, Longfield said.
All of it is excess and non-mission essential. These vehicles will be put back into the Army system after being refurbished.
"We are turning in a multitude of vehicles from humvees to fuel trucks to Heavy Equipment Transports, really a wide spectrum - almost every family of vehicle we have," Best added.
The vehicles brought in were grouped by type and by unit and the paperwork was already prepared. Grouping them allowed the person operating the computers to process the information much faster.
The 4th SB went also provided lunch and dinner in the CRSP yard, further expediting the process for all Soldiers involved in the operation.
Once a joint inspection was conducted by the RPAT team, the vehicles were signed over to AMC, relieving the unit commanders of responsibility.
The next step was moving the vehicles to the shipping line. The CRSP is currently in the process of shipping out these vehicles on 40-foot trailers to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.
"Depending on the frequency of the convoys, the vehicles should not sit on the ground for too long," Colsia said.
As the vehicles moved from the inspection lane to the shipping lane, they left some very satisfied customers behind.
"We got great support from the 4th Sustainment Brigade," Best said. "They were here from the get-go, setting this thing up for us. They have taken a tremendous amount of burden away from the unit, so we can sustain combat operations and do what we need to do within our area of responsibility. They will take care of the details; we can go back and do our mission after this."