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Defense Logistics in History
Since the birth of our great Republic, the United States exploited our comparative advantage in defense logistics as a key force multiplier. During the Revolutionary War, our ability to locally support our forces while disrupting British supply lines directly contributed to our victory. During World War II, our ability to sustain large forces in multiple distant theaters enabled us to liberate allied nations on three continents. Our ability to equip and sustain forward-deployed forces in high states of readiness enabled us to serve as an effective deterrent to communist aggression. This culminated in our victory in the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most recently, our ability to establish, secure and sustain a 4,000 mile air bridge enabled our Air Force to exceed 87 percent missioncapable rates in the Kosovo air campaign.
Today our military logistics capability is requested by our allies and envied by our adversaries. From Southwest Asia, to Western Europe, to the Pacific Rim and East Timor, our allies look to the U.S. for logistics support, emergency relief assistance and logistics consultation. In the past decade, adversaries from all corners of the globe experienced first hand our ability to deploy and sustain overwhelming forces.
Within this historic context, today we face the significant and urgent challenge of transforming our logistics system to meet operational requirements, as logistics sets the operational campaign limits. The need for transformation while we enjoy a dominant, unrivaled position is driven by three key factors:
Logistics failure is an unacceptable option
Increased operational tempos in response to changing threats
Emerging operational concepts that rely upon precision, agility and force projection.
Military logistics is one of those odd areas where the down-side risk significantly exceeds the upside gain. Just ask a military logistician. When everything works, it is a great operation! But when things go wrong, it is a logistics problem! To illustrate the point, let's review recent history. Our overwhelming victory in Desert Storm was accompanied by observations that our logistics system moved too much stuff, didn't know where the stuff was and took too long! More recently, due to unbelievable efforts of thousands of logistics information managers, the Department of Defense transitioned our logistics systems into the 21 st...
