A New Era in Army Maintenance

Policy-Driven Technological Change

By LTG Michelle Donahue

Article published on: May 14, 2026 in the Spring 2026 Edition of Army Sustainment

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LTG Michelle Donahue

MDO Maintenance: Forging Readiness in a Contested Era

In an era defined by renewed peer competition, the Army’s ability to generate and sustain lethality in a contested environment is the bedrock of victory. The comfortable assumptions of the past — persistent air superiority, secure communications, and uncontested supply lines — are no longer guaranteed. This new reality demands that our formations be able to fight and win while dispersed across vast distances and under constant threat. In a contested battlespace, existing maintenance challenges like aging infrastructure and personnel shortages become critical vulnerabilities. An adversary will actively target the already strained supply chain, making it nearly impossible to deliver critical repair parts. For units to survive and thrive in multi-domain operations (MDO), they must not only be lethal but also resilient. To support this, our maintenance and logistics enterprise must evolve in parallel. It must transform from a supporting effort into a core component of the warfighting function itself, with the goal of becoming more agile, predictive, and expeditionary than ever before.

To achieve this goal, the Army developed a comprehensive framework known as the MDO Maintenance Concept. This concept serves as the intellectual foundation for our maintenance doctrine, unifying efforts across technology, policy, and force structure. It operationalizes this new approach through three distinct but integrated maintenance levels:

• Depot Strategic/Forward Strategic: Revolutionizing the organic industrial base (OIB) by projecting national-level maintenance capabilities and expertise forward, closer to the point of need.

• Support: Modernizing the critical link between the strategic base and the tactical edge, ensuring the predictive flow of parts, data, and specialized skills across the theater.

• Tactical: Empowering the Soldier-maintainer with the advanced tools, authorities, and real-time data needed to sustain combat power directly in the fight.

Together, these efforts redefine sustainment as a proactive and integrated enabler of victory, not as a reactive support function.

The Analytical Underpinnings of Transformation

To ensure our transformation is comprehensive and correctly aligned, a series of operational planning teams met to design and assess the future of MDO maintenance, identifying potential sustainment operational capability gaps and shortfalls that inform current and future sustainment plans. This deep analysis allowed us to distinguish between immediate, critical needs and valuable enhancements that could be addressed later. Crucially, it also revealed the interdependencies between different maintenance functions, ensuring our approach would be holistic rather than piecemeal.

As a result of this analytical rigor, we are now engaged in a comprehensive maintenance allocation chart (MAC) revision for our most critical platforms — a foundational effort to redefine at what level maintenance tasks are performed,and with what tools.Facing initial data challenges from legacy systems, we developed and validated new analytical processes to build these new MACs, an approach that allows us to test new organizational designs with a high degree of fidelity.

From Analysis to Authority: The Policy Framework

Analysis and organizational redesign are only theoretical without the doctrinal authority to implement them. Therefore, this transformation requires a deliberate update to our guiding policies. Army Regulation (AR) 750-1, Army Materiel Maintenance Policy, and Department of the Army Pamphlet (DA PAM) 750-1, Army Materiel Maintenance Procedures, are currently undergoing a major revision, which is the cornerstone of our modernization and provides the authority to make this change permanent. This revision aims to update language, eliminate outdated terminology, and systematically address findings from recent audits. Most importantly, it will formally incorporate new, more efficient programs into Army doctrine.

A leading example is the Operational Readiness Program (ORP) initiative. In a direct effort to give time back to Soldiers, this program addresses the Chief of Staff of the Army’s concern that the force is over-servicing our equipment. It aims to unburden maintainers by shifting from traditional, time-based service schedules to a more flexible, usage-based model. This new posture is designed to reduce unnecessary maintenance workloads and maximize time for warfighting training. Operationally, this will be achieved through a multi-phased approach where the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command connects depot-level capabilities directly to brigade combat teams.

By embedding depot fly-away teams with units at critical points between training rotations and deployments, ORP not only services the Army’s most critical fleets, but also provides an invaluable hands-on training opportunity, increasing the proficiency of field-level maintainers working alongside depot repair specialists and highly skilled maintainers. The ultimate end state is a sustained readiness culture, a more predictable workload for the OIB, and better-trained mechanics at every echelon. By codifying programs like ORP, the updates to AR 750-1 and DA PAM 750-1 will reinforce the responsibilities of commanders, clarify funding, and streamline reporting to improve data accuracy across the enterprise.

A New Paradigm for MDO Sustainment: From Data to Action

With modernized maintenance policy as its foundation, the Army is now able to operationalize a new paradigm for MDO sustainment, shifting from reactive processes to proactive, data-driven solutions. The Griffin predictive aviation maintenance project, steered by the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Artificial Intelligence Integration Center, is a prime example of this shift in action. It is pioneering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze massive volumes of data from equipment sensors and maintenance records. By processing this data, the system identifies subtle patterns that predict when a component is likely to fail, often well before any fault is detected by conventional diagnostics. The goal is to leverage data in this way across the enterprise, providing commanders with greater predictability to schedule maintenance before a crisis occurs, which will increase equipment availability and reduce the overall logistics footprint.

However, projecting advanced repair capabilities forward is only half the solution; these tools are only effective if the Soldier in the field has the authority and expertise to use them. The Right-to-Repair initiative is aimed at dismantling proprietary barriers to ensure Soldiers have the necessary technical data and tools to fix their own equipment. The Army is already pioneering the use of AI and AI-powered smart glasses to revolutionize vehicle maintenance for the Infantry Squad Vehicle. The expansion of tele-maintenance support and augmented reality can provide a virtual over-the-shoulder connection to subject matter experts around the globe.

The MDO Maintenance Concept. (Image by COL Gregory Gibbons and Mr. Jeff Martin)

Conclusion: Integration Is the Key to Readiness

From deep analysis and foundational policy changes to pioneering new technologies, these distinct efforts are not happening in isolation. Army maintenance is transforming as these foundational efforts converge into a future closed-loop system of sustainment where predictive analytics determine the need, a forward-deployed OIB provides the means, and empowered Soldiers deliver expertise at the tactical edge. The impact of this G-4 policy-driven change will be a profound increase in combat readiness and lethality.

In contested environments — where predictable supply lines become predictable targets — this maintenance paradigm shift will provide commanders with decisive advantages.By anticipating equipment failures, compressing repair cycle times, and regenerating combat power, the Army will be able to sustain continuous, high-intensity operations and outpace any adversary. We will use data, AI, and modern technology to the maximum. Our leaders will drive this change, empowering our Soldiers to become masters of a new technological ecosystem — from leveraging predictive analytics to employing AI-driven diagnostics — directly on the front lines.

This We’ll Defend!