A physical security supervisor walks new armorers through an arms room inspection checklist during a March 2021 training session at Fort Polk, Louisiana. (U.S. Army photo by TC Bradford, Fort Polk PAO)
Mission Area
November 30, 2021
One of Congress’s priorities is to ensure that the U.S. military is able to maintain accountability of its property — specifically, its arms, ammunition and explosives (AA&E). In recent years, the military services have taken action to improve their overall AA&E reporting posture. One draft amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2022 requires all services, through the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), to report to Congress approximately 30 different types of AA&E lost during the previous fiscal year.
To meet this anticipated requirement, the Army foresaw the need to gather data from field units, verify and sift the data into reportable/non-reportable bins, and prepare and deliver the annual report to OSD and Congress. The Army established the AA&E Crisis Action Team (CAT), a group of experts in a variety of fields, to lead this effort, leveraging Army Vantage — the Army's data-driven operations and decision-making platform — as the technology solution.
As a first step, the Army Vantage team incorporated electronic Financial Liability Investigation of Property Loss (eFLIPL) information into its data platform. This helped the Army “see” what property had been lost. The AA&E CAT determined, however, that the eFLIPL data wasn’t timely enough to meet the Army’s requirements; additional data was required from Serious Incident Reports (SIR) and the Department of the Army (DA) Form 3056, which reports on missing/recovered firearms, ammunition and explosives. These siloed, data-generating activities needed to be integrated into a single, clear reporting picture in Army Vantage to provide better visibility into the weapons accountability problem.
In just four months’ time, the AA&E CAT stood up the Army Vantage AA&E Accountability Dashboard, allowing users to access eFLIPL data and look up any piece of serialized Army equipment from over 14 million serial numbers tracked in property records. This capability enabled the AA&E CAT to see lost weapons that had been reported on eFLIPLs but not on SIRs or DA Form 3056. The speed at which the Army Vantage platform provided information to team members enabled them to proactively address needs as they arose in real time — such as establishing a third data stream and resolving existing conflicts in the data landscape.
Army Vantage recently provided an enhancement to the AA&E Accountability Dashboard. Because units have to manually prepare DA Form 3056, the “free-form” text makes computerized searches difficult. The Army Vantage team added a capability to the dashboard that facilitates the creation of an automatic filing system for all lost, stolen or recovered AA&E. The AA&E CAT can now use the dashboard to file SIRs from the Army Operations Center, receive DA Form 3056 from units, see all eFLIPLs, and research any serial-numbered piece of Army equipment to gain a clear understanding of unit actions and equipment involved.
Today, any Soldier with a common access card can visit vantage.army.mil/da3056 to register for Army Vantage and prepare and store a DA Form 3056. The system can be used to send copies to local law enforcement, the National Crime Information Center, the Army Law Enforcement Reporting Tracking System and the Small Arms/Light Weapons Registry.
Army Vantage is helping pave the way for the Army‘s modernization effort for AA&E accountability. The Army Vantage AA&E Accountability Dashboard will effectively and efficiently identify, track, consolidate and report lost, stolen or recovered AA&E, thereby meeting the anticipated requirements of OSD and Congress.
”It’s gratifying that Army Vantage is providing yet another means of leveraging data for information readiness,” said Miranda Coleman, Army Vantage product lead at PEO EIS. “By modernizing existing weapons accountability processes and providing a more complete data picture, Army Vantage will help posture the Army to better ensure the safety of its personnel and our nation.”
Part of PEO EIS’s Army Data and Analytics Platforms, Army Vantage is the Army’s data-driven operations and decision-making platform. By joining and enriching millions of data points into artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning-capable applications, Army Vantage improves and accelerates decisions on everything from personnel readiness to financial return on investment. Today, thousands of operators across every echelon of the Army, including senior leaders, Soldiers, staff and analytic communities, use Army Vantage to improve the efficiency and accuracy of their work. Army Vantage is designed for speed, flexibility and impact — turning insights into actions, and AI into outcomes, faster than any other system. For more information, visit the Army Vantage program page.