Summary

GAO reviewed the Army's utilization of German civilians and Army reservists in Europe for general support and maintenance operations.

GAO found that: (1) the Army authorized the employment of 660 German civilians to support maintenance for U.S. forces in Europe and for potential mobilization as a maintenance battalion during wartime; (2) only 400 German civilians were currently in U.S. support maintenance groups, and some of those civilians were not eligible for military service; (3) many German civilian employees held lower-level maintenance jobs and lacked the proper training and experience to fill other support functions; (4) only about 27 percent of German civilians employed by the U.S. Army in essential maintenance jobs were exempt from the German draft; (5) the Army began the first phase of its program to rotate U.S. military reserves to Germany for support maintenance in April 1989; (6) U.S. Army reservists were trained on older, unserviceable vehicles, since no maintenance program had been established for the more modern equipment; and (7) the Army did not have a plan to evaluate the first-phase deployment of U.S. reservists overseas for support maintenance.