A young girl camps out in her bedroom and is joined by her mother.

A nearly century-old mother narrates her life story to her son. This was a life of struggle and tragedy for many Ukrainian people in the twentieth century. In 1917, the revolution, a plague with red commissars, descended upon Ukraine and her people. Anna, my mother, said that life turned into red and black colours: red stars and the big black guns of the commissars. Millions died under their unjust, oppressive regime, and Anna and her family were confined in a dungeon out on the deserted steppes; they were all doomed to perish. The commissars took all the people's grain and other products; the merciless "Golodomor," suffocation by hunger, killed many millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. And very soon, there was one more disaster: World War II, which stormed through the deeply wounded country, killing again many millions because Stalin and the other Kremlin rulers made this possible. My father, Ivan, was a pilot of a dive-bomber, lost his life in the war; like many millions of soldiers, he was betrayed by the Communist regime.

Performance measurement has long been a matter of debate in logistics. However, in the recent past, there has been a renewed emphasis as AF leaders continue to seek funding for weapon system spares despite marginal improvements in mission capability. The Chief's Logistics Review, Logistics Transformation Program, AFMC Constraints Assessment Program, the Spares Requirement Review Board, the Spares Campaign, and the Depot Maintenance Reengineering and Transformation all represent efforts to find and implement effective answers (RAND, 2003: ix). And, while there appears to be a consensus that better performance measures are needed, there is little agreement on exactly what should be measured, and how. Many performance management plans have been developed and recommended. In 1999, the Logistics Management Institute (LMI) published Supply Chain Management: A Recommended Performance Measurement Scorecard to guide senior DoD logistics managers.