DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What motivates you to do this job?
BROYLES: “Probably the soldiers. They really appreciate MTS. They thank you. They tell you how many lives it saved. If soldiers had their way, they’d want one on every vehicle.”
When Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s supply convoy from the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company was ambushed in Iraq in March 2003, there was one vital piece of technology that the haulers weren’t carrying: the Movement Tracking System.
If MTS had been installed in the 507th’s vehicles, it might have saved the lives of the soldiers who died after the convoy made an ill-fated wrong turn in the Iraqi desert.
Jimmy Broyles, a retired sergeant major, has spent the last three years in Iraq as a GS-13 Army civilian, helping to ensure that what befell Lynch’s convoy doesn’t happen again. Broyles’s job is to mount the satellite-based vehicle tracking system on Humvees and other logistics haulers. MTS lets Army officials stay in contact with convoys and get a quick, clear picture of their immediate surroundings.
The Army has deployed more than 10,000 systems on the ground in the Iraqi region.
“They can not only track the soldiers and the vehicles but can also track the loads,” says Broyles, who works as a systems integrator for the Army’s Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems.
Broyles has spent “the last three Thanksgivings, the last three birthdays” in Kuwait and Iraq leading a team of about 30 contract workers. There are six sites scattered across the region where troops can get MTS installed or have their systems serviced.
MTS, developed by Comtech Mobile Datacom Corp. of Germantown, Md., uses three technologies: two-way text messaging, Global Positioning System and color navigational mapping to track vehicles.
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