 All of us are heavily engaged in improving the combat readiness of our forces in the most cost-effective manner. Nowhere is this more evident than in our information mission area. We've made substantial gains in the past few years in both our management information systems and in our automated battlefield functions. But we need a culture change. We need to be very comfortable with storing and retrieving and sharing and transferring information in a totally automated, efficient manner. We've got to do so because we have the opportunity to cost avoid billions of dollars. Better live in three electronics, I call it. This then is the story today of moving our army into the Information Age. Company pouring light. An AH-64 Apache helicopter returns from a routine training mission. The pilot has reported an abnormal field of the controls. To the crew chief, this suggests a problem with a hydraulic system, and he orders the aircraft return to the maintenance hangar. There, he will have access to the complete library of manuals available to maintain the Apache. 20 plus in all. Somewhere in all this paper is printed the information that will help him find the problem with the aircraft and correct it. Piled one on top of the other, the manuals used in maintaining a single Apache aircraft are nearly as tall as the crew chief himself. This points up a problem that plagues the army today. An abundance of paper. Desks full of paper. File cabinets full of paper. Rooms full of paper. Buildings full of paper. Copy after copy after copy of paper documents, reports, specifications, requests for proposals, and the proposals themselves. Designs. Changes to designs. Maintenance manuals. Training manuals. The list goes on and on. Paper that is piling up in army offices and facilities. Choking the pipelines of army operations. Inundating personnel. Lowering efficiency. Reducing productivity. Wasting money. Interestingly, the army's paper problem today was created in large part by modern technology. Computers and other devices let us generate more and more paper easier and faster. Much of it paper we don't need. In effect, the technology has gotten ahead of us. Now, we are becoming masters of the technology. We are using it to move away from a paper environment to a workplace where paper can be replaced by electronic storage and retrieval. We are entering an era where this will be replaced by this. When this will be replaced by this. Where this will be replaced by this. Where this will be replaced by this. We are at the beginning of a new era where information will be created once in digital format, stored, and then used many times. An electronic culture. A new way of doing business. One of the most profound changes to take place in army history. The focal point for this massive cultural change over in the army is PEO Stamos. The program executive office, standard army management information system. Under a mandate from Congress to reduce paperwork, PEO Stamos is tasked to carry out a broad DOD initiative in effect to complete change in the way the army creates, collects, stores, distributes, and changes information. The ultimate objective is an all new and highly complex management information system that must be developed, acquired, installed, and maintained. It will be an electronic system building on all the various technological achievements in computer technology. Bringing them all together into a single universal system where all the diverse components can communicate together, work together. The starting point for the army-wide transition to an electronic culture is each individual office. Already, electronics are replacing paper in a variety of ways in the typical office. Army people are becoming more and more computer literate. They are learning not to miss paper documents. They are accepting electronic data transfer and communications. They are seeing firsthand that the culture of an electronic office is indeed upon us and that it works. As a case in point, in the day-to-day operations at PEO Stamos, management control of a network of more than 30 dispersed operations is conducted increasingly without paper, relying instead on electronic communications. No written reports unless needed. Printout only on demand. The move toward an electronic culture extends beyond the office to many of the broader functional areas under the control of PEO Stamos. For example, the application of electronics to improve the processes and controls for procurement acquisition, the management of personnel record data, and computerized medical management information in support of field medical units. The extremely positive results of automated handling of medical data during the Panama operation was a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of electronic data management in a wartime environment. But the ultimate achievement in an Army electronic environment is underway in the area of weapons systems acquisition and logistics support through the computer-aided system called CALS. It is a system that represents a joint initiative between the contractor community and the Department of Defense. Traditionally, the development and modification of weapons systems has inundated the military with paper from contractors, from initial design drawings to engineering changes to developmental records to training and maintenance manuals. In the Apache helicopter system, the paper required for development support fills huge rooms of file cabinets, both at the headquarters of the Army Aviation System Command where the weapon system is coordinated and managed and at the manufacturer's site. Designs for the Apache were prepared and delivered on paper, reviewed and changed on paper, stored and retrieved on paper, copy after copy after copy. Formal design reviews were held in conference format that brought together many people from remote locations for days at a time. Paper piled up, much of it made quickly obsolete as design and engineering changes were made. The process was laborious, and in light of today's technology it was inefficient and costly. In the CALS culture, the entire weapon system developmental process, starting with the initial design, will be digitized. The designs and all other developmental data will be created and updated by contractors on the computer, so there will be only one data source ever. The design will be networked to all with a need to know and will be accessible on a computer screen for evaluation review and change at any place, at any time. Security will be a primary objective with fail-safe procedures in place to prevent unauthorized disclosure. With CALS, evaluations by Army project management teams can be made individually at each reviewer's workstation, even hundreds of miles away. There is little or no need for distribution of paper copies. Copies that sit on desks, gathering dust, or end up stored in file drawers are in huge depositories. Expensive and time-consuming design review conferences will be minimized. At the same time, contractor test engineers can keep abreast of changes and conduct appropriate test programs. Manufacturing specialists will be able to evaluate design early and make sure each component can actually be produced. Technical and training resources can be developed concurrently with design, with the end results in electronic formats. In effect, CALS will cause a major cultural change. Work will no longer be conducted in series, transferred from one station to another, as it has for years. The workflow under CALS will tend to be parallel. A number of tasks performed simultaneously using the same basic digitized core data. When fully developed and implemented, CALS will provide a universal standard of electronic data management technology that will enable computer systems, even those that are incompatible today, to communicate together. Thus, any element of the system will be able to be used to enter, update, manage, and retrieve data from any database. It will be fully automated and integrated between contractors and the army at all stages of system development. In the near term, this means getting ready by replacing paper document transfer with a digital file exchange capability. Each contractor and government activity will join local islands of information together into islands of automation. In the longer term then, these islands of automation will be integrated into a nationwide system that permits them to talk to each other and makes possible a common database. Achieving such a system has involved the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where basic standards for this new technology are being developed. Fort Monmouth, New Jersey is the PEO's famous focal point for carrying out the mandate awarded the army by DOD to develop an overall architecture for the CALS system. There, developing CALS technology is being evaluated in a real-world testbed environment. Various computer systems that would normally be incompatible have been integrated into a single system. The concept of remote digitized data transfer is also being demonstrated, with engineering drawings being sent electronically to PEO's famous headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The digitized data are so detailed and precise that a drawing of an entire tank can be transferred from one location to another. This kind of data transfer is what the CALS system will be able to offer to both the contractor and the government when the technology is fully in place. At army facilities where weapon systems management teams operate, steps are being taken to get the current data systems ready to be integrated into CALS as smoothly as possible. Wherever possible, islands of information that relate to weapon systems acquisition and logistic support are being updated to islands of automation. At the aviation systems command in St. Louis, for example, the digital storage and retrieval of engineering data systems are being transferred from cards to optical disks. Digitized data, a giant step ahead of file cabinet storage, ready for incorporation into the coming CALS culture. Also at AFSCOM, a system is in place to receive digitized data from contractors working under the CALS concept on new weapon systems. Electronic communication is routinely exchanged between the facilities of such contractors and the project management team in St. Louis. Engineering change proposals are reviewed from the digitized data. LSA logistic support analysis reviews are made much more efficient and effective because they can be ongoing as opposed to having them lumped together in the closing developmental phases. Costly and inefficient configuration review board meetings have been minimized. All this has the potential for great savings in time and money for the army. Meanwhile, as the ultimate CALS technology is being developed, work goes on in the contractor community to integrate internal electronic communication systems to get them capable of talking to each other. A major element of the current army effort is to encourage contractors and their subs to create islands of automation and thereby keep abreast or even ahead of the emerging CALS state-of-the-art. This helps them be ready for the later phases of CALS when individual islands of automation will be able to communicate together. When all this happens, everyone in the army will benefit, including this crew chief. No longer would he have to pour through 20-plus volumes of maintenance manuals to repair a helicopter. Instead, he would have a simple plug-in computerized test set that would diagnose the problem and lead him quickly and easily to a fix. The electronic culture of CALS is coming. Step by step, industry and the army are getting ready. The benefits to the nation will be enormous. Studies show that future cost avoidance of 75% are possible in weapons documentation, billions of dollars. All new weapons systems developed after 1990 will incorporate the culture of CALS. In addition to those projects already underway, the longbow upgrade to the Apache, the Black Hawk helicopter, the Abrams tank, and the proposed LA helicopter. In the development of these systems, the transfer of digitized data will be routine. Less and less paper will be required, and savings in time, effort and cost will be profound. No matter where you work, in the army, in industry, for a contractor or his sub, in an office, a design center, a test lab, a data repository, wherever, you will benefit from an electronic culture. We welcome it as an important step to enhance the readiness of the army. You have seen that CALS is coming, giving us new, better ways of doing business in support of our weapons systems and the soldiers who rely on them. The concept works, and it works well. CALS will provide us the tools we need to do our jobs more effectively and at a lower cost. It will permit ready access to up-to-date, accurate technical information in electronic form by everyone involved in logistic support, from a provisioner in AMC to the mechanic in the 3rd Armored Division. And it will provide those of us in the army with the means for rapid, cost-effective digital exchange with our counterparts in industry. The burden of paper technical documentation grows heavier each day. CALS gives us the ability to reverse the unrelenting trend and move toward an efficient and effective, paperless environment. Clearly, the time is now for CALS.