As you can imagine, the Army has tremendous inventory management and maintenance requirements for this equipment to ensure its availability and readiness in the event of situations like those in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo. If a soldier is going to put his life on the line with a piece of equipment he's never seen, he needs some way to determine if the equipment is operational and ready to use prior to his arrival in the theater of operation. Currently, the central server in the United States contains about two gigabytes of data. Each day, as military personnel in these numerous locations perform their inventory and maintenance tasks, they enter updated information into their local ASA databases. It's difficult to maintain the level of readiness required in today's unpredictable world when your information is that dated.
Old information can lead to wasteful decisions.
For example, as a backup, to ensure the safety of the troops, a decision could be made to fly certain equipment to a theater of operation when it may already be there. Such a decision can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The Automated Battlebooks System is a logistics planning tool designed to be used by soldiers to access real-time information on equipment availability at Army War Reserve sites around the world. This eliminates the possibility of landing in harm's way without the equipment required to execute the mission. We needed an industry-standard database that would guarantee us some longevity.