DFAS Indianapolis

DFAS Indianapolis is an enormous building. The facility is a large square monolithic looking place found in the suburbs of Indianapolis. All around the exterior, apart from the side facing the main road, are fields of parking lots. Inside, the place has as much character as a hospital. Maybe even less so. The long halls running through the interior of the place are bereft of any color, art, or anything else that may cause warmth or please the eye. The basic amenities are there – offices, a coffee shop, a small shop, a cafeteria, and a small, outdated gym – but it isn’t any place someone would visit besides to do work.

Before going to DFAS Indianapolis, the only experience I had in my mind about the place was the mess they had made with travel voucher reimbursement for fellow Lieutenants when I attended the Finance Basic Officer Leadership Course this past year. So, in many ways, I initially felt like I was headed to some hornet’s nest.

However, and thankfully, the only people I met for training there were knowledgeable and competent. Me and my boss, a Lieutenant Colonel from the Reserve Component, had a fairly packed schedule as we were brought up to date on the several systems DoD currently utilizes in order to reduce the amount of currency on the battlefield. We also met several key people within DFAS, and one from the Pentagon, who are a wealth of information on DoD finance policy.

If you want to know the breadth of information this policy covers, take a look at the DoDFMR online (link). Mainly, we use the DoD FMR Volume 5 Chapters 12, 14, and 34 for what we do as the ARCENT/326th FMC Banking Team.

One peculiar thing I noticed about the working atmosphere around DFAS was the strong personal feelings, both positive and negative, that permeated just about every working relationship throughout the place. Was this due to bad leadership, bad followers, or was it just the price to pay for having very knowledgeable people who are just set in their ways? I wasn’t entirely sure, and I didn’t stay long enough to really judge it one way or the other.

In the end, I felt, and still feel, that my experience there brought me up to speed on the essentials I need here at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.