“Is the Army deficient now in a core competency, wholesale stock management?”
No doubt that there are automatic processes in place. Item managers in the Army Materiel Command and Defense Logistics Agency, and pre-existing contract options for contingency production.
Left to itself, the requirement would be identified, and work it’s way into the budget next year or the year after, likely spread over how ever many years the staff officers in the Pentagon had to juggle competing budget requirements.
To get faster fills would require identification of a pressing risk, acceptance of the urgency of that requirement by Senior Leaders, and new money from Congress.
Perhaps (hopefully) some over-caffeinated staff officer is toiling away to get two dozen signatures on such a formally identified urgent requirement, as we recline in our armchairs….
AMC really no longer exits. It became something called a total life cycle management agency when it moved to Redstone. Before it moved the HQ was a joke. For instance in spite of direct Army regs and Public Law HQ AMC had no command FOIA officer, the SGS consisted of one LTC and a captain, Personnel could not begin to estimate how many contractor personnel the command employed. Most real management of log functions and depots went to DLA, a command that bluntly stated it only used ‘business metrics’ for guidance. My suspicion is that wholesale logistics is just one of the many broken elements within DOD. A war with a peer competitor such as China would be very entertaining.