Before the Crimea annexation, though, the Army’s main prepositioning location was at Camp Darby in Livorno, Italy. The Middle East and the Indo-Pacific each had two major prepositioning sites, by comparison, in addition to floating stocks on Navy logistics ships. Since 2014, three new Army prepositioning sites have opened in Europe: Eygelshoven, Netherlands, which opened in 2016 and features eight climate-controlled warehouses and 50,000 square feet of additional storage; Dülmen, Germany, which opened in 2017 and features seven warehouses’ worth of war stocks; and Zutendaal, Belgium, which also opened in 2017, adding 15 more climate-controlled warehouses and 40,000 square feet of hardstand storage space. A fourth new site, in Powidz, Poland, is NATO-funded. It includes 650,000 square feet of climate-controlled warehouse space, a vehicle maintenance facility and a munitions storage area covering 58,000 square feet. It’s set to open later this year.
As it made massive storage capacity additions, the Army also experimented with what it could do with its prepositioned gear. One of the primary objectives of the inaugural Defender-Europe exercise was to demonstrate how APS-2 gear could be drawn, issued to troops, used and returned in a combat-like situation. In December 2021, the Army’s 21st Theater Sustainment Command pulled gear out of the APS sites in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and transported it several hundred miles to Leghorn Army Depot, Italy in a complex logistics drill. In all, 700 pieces of rolling stock and equipment – enough to equip a light infantry battalion and base support battalion – were mounted on trucks and transported south.
The urgency of the IG looking at the maintenance of the pre-positioned equipment has likely been greatly increased due to the relatively recent revelations about the state of Russia’s reserve war stocks. Russian corruption and negligence in the long term maintenance of the equipment and the resultant uselessness of a lot of the equipment without major rebuilds was quite a surprise to the west. It may not have been a great surprise to the Russians but I think they were hoping to win the war quickly so they would not have to touch those stocks. (If you don’t have to touch the stocks there is no need to look closely at how they are being stored and maintained. But they did, to great embarrassment.) Now the IG wants to make sure that we do not have a similar problem.