Editorial: Standardize DOD Delivery

"Semper Fidelis” goes the U.S. Marine Corps motto, meaning “always faithful.” Trucking is about as close as you can get to this venerable maxim without being an actual leatherneck, and trucking does have its share of such former Marines.

This is why trucking’s current difficulties with delivering to military facilities are so painful.

Fleet executives, middle managers and drivers get it. Hauling military freight — whether Meals Ready to Eat, computers or weapons and ammunition — is not the same as transporting regular consumer goods. Everyone taking part in the Pentagon’s supply chain needs to be checked out thoroughly and get regular updates.

Random drivers obviously cannot show up at military bases, camps and forts whenever they please. But when they do, they must have a federally approved Transportation Worker Identification Credential, or TWIC. Trucking has been a big supporter of this credential.

To get a TWIC, the applicant must provide fingerprints and proof of U.S. citizenship and then go through an FBI criminal background and security check. That is the procedure formed by the Transportation Security Administration.

Getting a TWIC is a formidable hurdle, but the idea is to make it tough before delivery. Then, when a driver shows up with a TWIC and other appropriate paperwork at any of the nation’s more than 700 Department of Defense sites, inspection should be followed fairly quickly by entry.

Or that’s how it is intended to work, but it really doesn’t, as our story on page 1 shows.

“Our drivers increasingly have to undergo security vetting every time they show up at the gates to pick up or deliver freight. This process can take as much as 1½ to 3 hours,” American Trucking Associations President Bill Graves said in a May 8 letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

“We are experiencing a tremendous number of inconsistencies and a lack of standardization of secure gate-entry practices,” Graves said.

When the arbitrary delays from military deliveries are combined with strict compliance with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s hours-of-service rule — and that, too, is an absolute necessity — collapse and chaos are the result.

Trucking is certainly willing to live with and perform within DOD rules, even if they need to be tightened. Set them, and the industry will comply. But so, too, must the gatekeepers at DOD installations.

When Defense and the Transportation Security Administration arrive at universal, and smooth, TWIC standards, that should be how trucking rolls, and indeed it will, to proudly supply the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marine Corps.

Semper fi.