Cpl. Brenden Moore delivers sheet metal on March 26, 2026, to the 1st Armored Division’s recently opened Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
FORT BLISS, Texas — Every time Army vehicle maintainers want to remove a wheel bearing nut from heavy equipment transporter trailers, they must beat each one loose with a hammer and chisel.
It can take up to five minutes for each of the trailer’s 18 nuts, which are the main components maintaining a hold on the vehicle’s tires, said Chief Warrant Officer 2 Adam Palone, the 1st Armored Division’s allied trade technician. Not only is it time-consuming and damaging to the hardware, but mechanics also risk smacking their fingers.
Now there is a better way.
Machinists working in the division’s new Iron Foundry motor pool created a socket to attach and easily remove each nut within about 30 seconds. Pfc. John Gozzo, a machinist, designed the socket to be a perfect fit and manufactured it with the new fabrication tools and technology housed in the foundry — first in plastic with a 3D printer to prove the concept and then in steel to push out to the units.
“It’s nice to actually be able to work on something and see it in action,” Gozzo said.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Adam Palone, allied trade technician for the 1st Armored Division, holds the prototype of a socket that attaches to the wheel bearing nut of a heavy equipment transporter trailer to make the hardware easier to remove on March 26, 2026, at the Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
As for the mechanics on the receiving end, whose 90-minute task was reduced to nine, “They love it. They want more,” Palone said.
The Iron Foundry, formally opened in February, brings together all allied trade specialists in the division to work in one shop. They take suggestions, design, fabricate with the latest technology and weld to keep vehicles running — particularly when parts are unavailable or no longer exist.
“None of this is the traditional side of maintenance that we’re doing here. What we’re doing is keeping these pieces of equipment in the fight and keeping them going,” Palone said.
The Iron Foundry, named for the division’s nickname “Old Ironsides,” is just one of several innovations the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, has launched recently to help maintainers work smarter, reduce costs and keep vehicles mission-ready. Other efforts include smart boxes to monitor heavy equipment transporters, certification courses for mechanics and data-informed predictive maintenance plans.
Combined, the division has saved $1.5 million since October, improved driver safety and honed the division’s fleet of vehicles so that they spend more time mission- ready and less time in the shop.
The changes address Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s call for the service to take back some of its right to repair its own vehicles from contractors and to pursue vehicle readiness in a way that employs more technology to solve simple problems.
A wall of the foundry bears a quote from Driscoll: “We will no longer accept that we cannot repair our own stuff.”
It is all about solving the problems that exist right now, said Brig. Gen. Jared Bordwell, the division’s deputy commander for support.
“I have the solution in my formation; I just have to ask the right folks. Most of the time that’s the junior soldiers that are struggling with that problem,” he said.
Machinists in the Iron Foundry fabricate low-risk parts the Army is authorized through its contracts to make on its own and that do not change the characteristics of the vehicle and how it handles, Bordwell said.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Adam Palone, allied trade technician for the 1st Armored Division, checks on the machine that prints metal parts on March 26, 2026, at the Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
It’s not just about the nearly 700 parts created to save about $550,000, “it’s about the 70 platforms we’ve gotten back into the fight,” Bordwell said.
During a visit last month, machines hummed away, creating hubcap removal tools for the Abrams tank, secondary fuel system filters and door latch pins for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.
Before they began making the hubcap tool, there was only one for the entire division to share among each brigade’s 86 tanks. It wasn’t available to order, Palone said. The Army system only had 90 of the fuel system filters available and the division needed 90.
And each of the door pins costs about $2,500 to order but can be made on-site for just $2.50, Bordwell said.
Sgt. Timothy Owens, left, and Spc. Trey Ybanez do welding work on the hatch of a M113 armored personnel carrier on March 26, 2026, at the 1st Armored Division’s recently opened Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
Meanwhile, the 377th Transportation Company was recently back from a field exercise that was the first to incorporate smart boxes installed inside each of its 85 heavy equipment transporters.
The small black boxes mounted beneath the dashboard on the passenger side of the trucks act as a digital source collector, said Capt. Anthony Winston, the company commander.
The smart boxes, first put to use in June 2024, allow mechanics to review reports of specific parts that are triggering problems in the vehicle, even if there isn’t a “check engine” warning.
The system lets mechanics, who learn the system through a three-week diagnostic course, know if it’s just a faulty fuel injector or a sensor in need of replacement.
“We can then take the vehicle into our maintenance bay and then go through a more encompassing walkthrough that we may not have been able to do if we didn’t have the system installed,” Winston said.
It saves troubleshooting man-hours and costs by replacing small parts instead of an entire engine, said Col. Delarius Tarlton, commander of the 1st Armored Division Sustainment Brigade.
In return, the company increased the fleet’s fully mission capable rate by roughly 35%, said Sgt. Maj. William Frazer, division maintenance sergeant major.
Spc. Jeremiah Rosario scans a part to create a 3-D printing design file on March 26, 2026, at the 1st Armored Division’s recently opened Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
“The impact to this is all the data that we’re getting here is setting the foundation for predictive analysis. We’re getting out ahead of the repairs and the faults, and we’re pretty much advancing our maintenance that way,” he said.
The smart boxes also provide Winston with reports on drivers, and he can mitigate speeding and other operator-related issues that can cause vehicles to break down.
“If it’s an axle or something like that that may be going wrong, we can then keep our soldiers safe because we’re operating under a safe speed limit, and we won’t have to replace any of those types of equipment faults,” Winston said.
Right now the smart boxes are only available for wheeled vehicles, but there is a push to get them on tracked vehicles as well, Tarlton said.
The Army’s Transformation Decision Analysis Center is working with the division to better understand and organize the information and implement strategies, said Steven Kratzmeier, sustainment division chief for the center.
Through the division, the center has proven the ability to collect data on the health of vehicles and use it to give soldiers real-time action items, Kratzmeier said. At the higher level of the center, engineers can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze combat readiness and respond to trends.
The center is only working with the 1st Armored Division in this way but the program could be replicated in other units, he said.
As the division began laying the foundation for these programs, it dug into the root causes of the maintenance work being conducted to get at the heart of the issues, said Chief Warrant Officer 5 David Marriott, senior ground logistics officer. More than 60% of the things breaking were caused by maintenance or operator failure, he said.
This led the division to create a Ground Maintenance Training Program — the final piece of the overhaul, which ensures that mechanics get more in-depth training and earn certifications that chart progress in the program. It mirrors the certification levels used among Army aviation maintenance units, Marriott said.
Mechanics reach different levels of certification after taking additional training and passing written and hands-on tests. The program began as a pilot just over a year ago with 1st Brigade Combat Team and proved its success when the unit arrived in Europe for a deployment earlier this year.
Pfc. Raven Douds operates a computer numerical control metal manufacturing machine to make door latch pins for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle on March 26, 2026, at the 1st Armored Division’s recently opened Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
The brigade had 90% of its vehicles able to drive out of travel storage on their own power, Marriott said. Typically, units hit about 60%, he said.
“We’re under surveillance all the time, so if somebody sees everything roll off, they’re like, ‘Wow, this is the most ready brigade we’ve ever seen show up in Europe,’” Marriott said.
The division also saw savings by reducing the number of high-dollar replacement parts it has purchased since implementing the program. One tank engine is about $1.5 million, and the division purchased 87 in 2024.
Last year, it bought 38, Marriott said. Of those, 10 were replaced because of manufacturing defects.
“Twenty-eight were caused by an operator or a maintainer doing something that caused the engine to fail early, which is drastically different than the 72 that we had in 2024,” Marriott said. “So, we think that training program is worth its weight in gold. It already paid for itself, essentially.”
It is now being rolled out to the division’s other five brigades as they have recently returned from deployments, he said.
When 1st Brigade deployed to Europe, it brought with it two pallets of parts manufactured in the Iron Foundry, Bordwell said. Those parts should get their final vehicles mission-ready and highlight that it is all these innovations working together to have improved readiness, he said.
“The one thing we can’t give soldiers is more time,” Bordwell said. “They always have more work than they have time, so whenever we are able to create something down here that creates a compressed timeline and now they can do something else or possibly not work till eight at night with a hammer and a chisel, that’s where we see the big wins, and that’s also where we see the buy-in.”
Sgt. Timothy Owens works with the welding tool on March 26, 2026, at the 1st Armored Division’s recently opened Iron Foundry at Fort Bliss, Texas. (Rose L. Thayer/Stars and Stripes)
