COMMENTARY

The ‘Short List’ for Achieving a Logistics Revolution

by Colonel Larry D. Harman, USA (Ret.)

The intent of this article is to present a “short list” of changes, or reforms, that I believe will ignite a real revolution in U.S. military logistics transformation. Stated somewhat differently, there are three changes that will force a fundamental and irreversible shift in the provisioning of our future forces. These three revolutionary changes are—

• Creating a single, national-level project-and-sustain command.
• Attaining unprecedented speed in operations.
• Achieving overwhelming force protection.

Other required changes will combine with the three on the short list to foster a comprehensive rebalancing of end-to-end force projection and sustainment. I believe that the short list can be implemented in the 2008 to 2018 timeframe.

The short list is not focused solely on the individual armed services and the regional combatant commands. It also is aimed at the decisionmaking processes of any potential adversary who might be considering military action against the United States or one of its allies or friends. An adversary’s senior decisionmakers must understand that the United States can and will project and employ its combat forces with great speed, precision, audacity, lethality, and sustainability. This understanding should dissuade the competent, as well as the incompetent, enemy from confronting the United States militarily. If dissuasion fails, the enemy will be subjected to the full might of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Cultural clashes undoubtedly will occur within the U.S. military establishment as these three changes are debated. The good news is that each potential change will go through experimentation and prototyping before it is fully implemented. Let me elaborate on why the revolutionary transformation changes I suggest are required and then discuss each of the three changes that make up the short list in more detail.

High Stakes

Department of Defense (DOD) transformation will affect the entire U.S. military. As one might surmise, the eventual outcomes of this deliberate transformation are unknown, but one thing is quite clear: The military element of U.S. national power will remain, and must remain, second to none in the world. In its quest for persistent military superiority, the United States will vigorously pursue overmatching and asymmetric advantages over any potential or actual threat or combination of threats.

Future threats will run the gamut: near-peer and nonpeer adversaries; state and nonstate actors; competent regional competitors; conventional and unconventional, symmetric and asymmetric, cyber, informational, and space threats; weapons of mass effects and destruction; and transnational terrorism. Anti-access and area denial strategies also will create challenges for our forces when they deploy into a theater. Obviously, the stakes are high. Our way of life, standard of living, and international prestige are all targets. These are facts, not exaggerated conjecture.

A Project-and-Sustain Revolution

To either preempt or respond to a single threat or a combination of threats, our future military forces, regardless of service, location, or mission, will be projected and sustained quite differently than they are today. In the future, a force with overmatching “speed” in every domain will win; conversely, a force that is slow to “sense, understand, decide, and act” will lose. The chaotic and unpredictable 21st century operational environment, accompanied by technological innovations, intelligent and determined adversaries, and the anticipated broad range of U.S. military missions, demands a coherent force projection and sustainment revolution that exploits knowledge, speed, technology, and wise decisionmaking.

Greater Than Joint

The 21st century force projection and sustainment revolution also must be greater than joint. By this, I mean that the individual services should not come together only on a temporary basis to accomplish a mission; the U.S. military must have some standing joint organizations. These new organizations must perform deployment, operational, sustainment, and command and control missions in a more coherent manner that eliminates harmful gaps or seams in missions; gross inefficiencies; operational mismatches; unnecessary delays in entry operations; and poor situational awareness and understanding. Other Federal agencies, nongovernmental and private volunteer organizations, contractors, and coalition military forces will join with the U.S. military to achieve operational and strategic goals.

Of course, significant evolutionary progress has been made in the last decade. A culture of service, interagency, industrial, and multinational cooperation is emerging. Old counterproductive barriers, such as “we versus they” mindsets and service parochialism, are eroding as new cooperative thinking and decisionmaking take hold and service interdependencies begin to evolve. A new balance among the services, Federal agencies, allies, and industry is creating synergistic opportunities for maximizing effectiveness.

The “Short List”

I believe that DOD-wide transformation will require literally thousands of significant changes, but only a small percentage of them have truly revolutionary potential. I came to this belief after digesting a wealth of Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, joint, and Office of the Secretary of Defense publications; other professional writings and futuristic concepts; and lessons learned.

Just within the force projection and sustainment domains, hundreds of changes are required. However, I believe that the three required changes of the short list are of such great importance that, without their implementation, the entire DOD transformation effort will fall short of expectations.

Creating a Single Project-and-Sustain Command

The United States requires one national-level command that is responsible for projecting and sustaining its military forces. To put this another way, a requirement exists for one deployment, sustainment, and distribution process owner who is a commander and not just a staff principal.

This unifying command would be vital to transformation. Based on strategic and theater priorities, the command would project required military capabilities to mission areas worldwide. Then, from a strategic perspective, it would keep those capabilities mission ready. Some critics may argue that such a command would result in over-centralization; in reality, the advantages of decentralized execution would not be discarded. The intent would be to create a much higher degree of strategic and theater agility and flexibility than has been experienced before. Without question, legislative changes to Title 10 of the U.S. Code would be required to achieve this agility and flexibility.

The new project-and-sustain command would be responsive to the President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the regional combatant commands, and the unified functional commands. At the strategic level, it would promote a worldwide “sense, understand, decide, and act” cycle, with the emphasis on “acting.” It would contribute to the emerging deployment-employment-sustainment warfighting continuum that acknowledges a distinct blurring among the levels of war, force projection, force employment, and force sustainment. This command also would be instrumental in achieving a transformed, national-level force reconstitution, redeployment, and demobilization continuum.

The command would exploit network-centric command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) capabilities in order to gain shared situational awareness and understanding in the deployment, operational, and sustainment domains. It also would be better able to manage the problems created by high demand for low-density capabilities that plague the military today.

An effective organizational structure, accompanied by appropriate organizational behavior, is important. The command should reap the benefits of structural synergies. This national-level project-and-sustain command and its subordinate commands would be built initially from the existing U.S. Transportation Command and Defense Logistics Agency and from portions of the services’ logistics and support structures. For example, the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program and its Navy and Air Force equivalents would become part of this national-level command. The new command would be engaged in the worldwide pre-positioning of equipment and sustainment supplies, whether ashore or afloat. New types of specialized, subordinate multiservice organizations may evolve to work alongside units from the individual services.

Some of the force projection and sustainment capabilities now assigned to service component commands in each of the regional combatant commands could migrate to this national-level command. The reasons for this realignment can be found in trends in DOD toward—

• Defining joint and service core competencies and eliminating unnecessary redundancies.
• Unifying disparate deployment and sustainment capabilities.
• Fostering commonality in equipment.
• Compressing deployment timelines.
• Developing capabilities to change the conduct of operations rapidly and to deal with various worldwide threats simultaneously.
• Adopting emerging research, development, test, and evaluation processes and new acquisition strategies.
• Emphasizing distribution-based logistics.
• Establishing standing joint forces.

Of course, creation of the project-and-sustain command would require resolution of many secondary matters, such as budget authority; affordability; span of command and control; unity of command; service roles and missions; degree of centralization; generation of doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facility (DOTMLPF) requirements; compatibility of information systems; metrics for assessing effectiveness; and Reserve components transformation.

Attaining Unprecedented Speed

The United States must achieve unprecedented speed in military operations, as well as in nonmilitary activities that support the achievement of both military and political objectives. Force projection and sustainment are no exceptions. The speed of future strategic and operational maneuver will be determined by the speed of deployment. The speed at which sustainment flows forward and rearward must exceed the speed of maneuver. New readiness models and the requirements generation process must reflect the need for speed. Both materiel and nonmateriel solutions must be sought.

The U.S. military needs a new mindset that calls for the speed of sustainment replenishment to increase, not slow down, as shipments and other types of support approach the combat zone and supported units. The speed of retrograding sustainment also must improve dramatically. In the future, ever-increasing speed will not be a luxury afforded only to the highest priority needs. A DOD-wide cultural leap in sustainment and distribution speed and precision will be mandatory if radically improved time-definite delivery (TDD) and customer wait time (CWT) standards are to be achieved. The term “sustainment and distribution elasticity” also must be embraced as a measure of effectiveness. Unprecedented high speeds will enable sustainment operations to transform into more viable “maneuver sustainment” operations.

Speed must be applied in three domains: cognitive, information, and physical. Within the cognitive domain, speed of command will be imperative. Rapid identification of alternatives and options will assist leaders greatly. Decisionmaking speed, enhanced by decision support aids, modeling, and simulations, should be accessible down to the lowest levels of leadership. Knowledge management will be imperative, and innovative thinking will be critical.

Within the information domain, speedy and disciplined access to information will help leaders gain and maintain information superiority. A collaborative information environment will promote rapid sharing of information, thereby providing shared situational understanding throughout the force. Sensors and sensor range will be exploited; a sense-and-respond maneuver sustainment concept will encourage speed in sustainment; and futuristic “information cockpits” will expand computer-human interfaces. To maintain the power that comes from knowledge, a central information repository with backup networks will evolve and reach-back capabilities for obtaining information will mature. Of course, developing speed in the information domain will depend on transformational communications technology featuring expanded band-width, network-centric activities, horizontal integration, persistent surveillance, and predictive analysis. All of these will lead to a viable, logistics-oriented common operational picture.

To increase speed within the physical domain, a ubiquitous sense-and-respond maneuver sustainment system must replace focused logistics and supply chain management. This will require sophisticated sensor, information, and communications networks.

An alternative to the DOD Uniform Material Movement and Issue Priority System (UMMIPS) also is required. A future UMMIPS alternative could allow for only four priorities: priority 1 (war or contingency, urgent); priority 2 (war or contingency, pulsed); priority 3 (mission critical or not mission capable, pulsed); and priority 4 (routine, pulsed).

New families of aerial platforms (manned and unmanned) and shallow-draft, high-speed sealift vessels could facilitate rapid distribution among commercial vendors, continental United States (CONUS) depots and distribution centers, pre-positioned sustainment locations (both ashore and afloat), theater-level sources of supply, and requesting activities. Most, if not all, sustaining units could have organic aerial vehicles, just as units today are authorized trucks.

High-speed maneuver sustainment distribution is a nonnegotiable requirement for speed in the physical domain. The new distribution system should resemble simultaneous sprint relays, where “baton passes” (the distribution nodes) are few in number and quick in execution, all segments of the “race” (the distribution pipeline) are run “hell bent” for the finish line (the supported unit or weapon system), and the weight of the “batons” (the transportation modes) is less than that of current versions. “Smaller, lighter, and faster” should be force projection and maneuver sustainment virtues. Essentially, the United States must dramatically improve its combat power per ton ratio.

Some sustaining organizations could self-deploy. Distribution capabilities that are seemingly unimaginable by today’s thinking could replace current technologies. New containerization, packaging, and materials-handling developments will promote speed. The U.S. military should no longer rely on contemporary surface means of transport from CONUS to deployed units. Dependence on fixed airfields and improved seaports must decline dramatically, especially for early-entry operations; that will negate in part an adversary’s anti-access and area denial strategy. Innovative basing strategies must be exploited. Worldwide flexible land basing, agile forward operating bases, and sea basing must mature to facilitate responsiveness, agility, and sustainability.

Worldwide TDD and CWT standards must be reduced, and those standards must be nonnegotiable. To measure CWT and TDD effectiveness, the requisitioning process may require that future document numbers be expanded to include the exact time (Zulu time) that a request was generated. Minutes will matter in the serious business of maneuver sustainment.

Technological advances must be embedded in the force. For example, sensors with increased range could be used in making diagnostic and prognostic checks of vehicles, weapons platforms, ammunition, and human health. Robotics should be exploited by units when in garrison and when deployed.

New families of aerial vehicles will be required for dedicated maneuver sustainment. These vehicles should be self-deployable and multipurpose; have vertical or super-short take-off and landing capabilities; have a range of at least 800 miles and attain speeds in excess of 300 miles per hour; possess some stealth characteristics; and be easily operated, simple to maintain, and relatively inexpensive when compared to current rotary-wing platforms. Payloads will vary depending on type of aerial vehicle.

If the United States is to deny sanctuary to any adversary and sustain its forces simultaneously, it must accelerate dramatically the speed at which forces task-organize, deploy, and conduct and sustain operations.

Achieving Overwhelming Force Protection

Arguably, a new American way of fighting and winning wars is evolving. Although linear and contiguous military operations may still occur, future operations are more likely to be nonlinear, widely distributed, noncontiguous, simultaneous, and sequential. To add more complexity to the situation, an adversary may have niche parity with the United States in certain destructive capabilities or may even possess some asymmetric advantages it can spring on a U.S.-led force. A shrewd and determined enemy will attack U.S., allied, or coalition targets as opportunities surface. Since sustainment activities are frequently an enemy’s targets of choice (a lesson relearned in conflicts of the last decade), we need to change the future enemy’s mindset so that he intentionally avoids attacking our maneuver sustainment forces.

To achieve overwhelming force protection, the following issues must be considered—

• The United States may require special joint task forces to secure strategic- and theater-level air and sea lines of communication from CONUS into the joint operations area and combat zone entry points.
• U.S. forces should be trained and equipped to sustain and protect asymmetrically, thereby keeping the enemy guessing and paralyzed. Adversaries must not be able to predict U.S operations.
• Past sustainment protection practices no longer work. Sustainment missions must be treated as combat operations. Sustainment must be mobile in order to survive. Unprecedented speed (cognitive, informational, and physical) will contribute immeasurably to protecting maneuver sustainment units. Situational awareness down to the lowest levels will be mandatory.
• Since fewer stockpiles of sustainment will be part of the future military culture, the security of each shipment will become more critical. Dedicated or organic armed aerial escort with at least a limited capability to suppress enemy air defenses will be essential for maneuver sustainment operations.
• Dedicated or organic air traffic control capabilities will be required for aerial maneuver sustainment operations. Ever-changing aerial sustainment corridors will replace, over time, traditional ground supply routes. Sustainment vehicles and equipment must have greater survivability and protection; for example, there should be no thin-skinned ground vehicles in the combat zone.
• Robotics and various types of protection-related sensors must be exploited. Protection of automated logistics and other C4ISR systems will be imperative.

 

Simply stated, the time for major reform is now. The U.S. military must rebalance itself to project and sustain future forces in ways previously unimaginable. The three changes identified on the short list are the ones to tackle aggressively.

Colonel Larry D. Harman, USA (Ret.), is a senior concept developer assigned to the Joint Experimentation Directorate, J–9, U.S. Joint Forces Command, at Suffolk, Virginia. He retired from the Army after 30 years of service.

This article expresses the views of the author, not the Department of Defense or any of its agencies.