Asymmetric Advantage or Achilles Heel: Logistics in the U.S. Military

The ability of the United States military to deploy, supply, and redeploy its forces is unparalleled in the history of warfare. Professor Colin S. Gray writes that the U.S. military may “not have always been well-directed strategically or operationally. But that military establishment has always shown a mastery of logistics.” Since the end of the Second World War, logistics has been the great asymmetric advantage of the U.S. military. However, current and emerging challenges demand an updated concept of military logistics.

M3 Stuart Tank at the Battle of Kasserine Pass, 1943 (History.net)

Today, however, this proud tradition is at risk. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed vulnerabilities in the logistics of the American economy and the U.S. military. Supply chains are too dependent on foreign nations, too lean, and brittle. Fast and efficient in good times, global supply chains became slow and chaotic in crisis. Millions of consumers looking for toilet paper, N95 masks, or other goods discovered these limitations in 2020. The light, lean, and lethal supply chain of the United States halted when shocks to supply, demand, and international shipping stressed the system (although the supply chain has proven resilient over a longer time horizon.)

Another contributing factor to American military logistics’ decline is the ubiquity of information and sensing systems in the world. The DoD’s reliance on commercial and open-source data creates significant vulnerabilities. In the past, adversaries needed spies or satellites to observe the build-up of supplies or the movement of combatants, now they can do the same through cyber surveillance, and worse, what they can hack they can probably disrupt. In addition to the dangers posed in the cyber realm, the proliferation of space assets and the range of today’s kinetic threats have put American military logistics at risk at every step, from the manufacturer to the last tactical mile.

To combat the disruption of logistics prowess, the U.S. military must establish some basic principles of logistics to map the terrain and then apply these principles to organize, train, and equip the future joint force. These three main principles should guide innovation in U.S. military logistics going forward.

Military logistics biases towards the physical domain. Military logistics deals in elements seen, felt, and heard. Combatants must be moved to battle, supplied, and kept alive. The laws of physics still dominate our shared human reality, and there is no virtual substitute for war materiel needed in physical combat.

The Russian military’s experience during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine illustrates the importance of the physical domain on logistics in warfare. Much of the analysis before the conflict, focused on Russian domination of the information sphere and the overwhelming numbers of Russian battalion tactical groups massed on Ukraine’s borders.[2] Within days of Russia's invasion, however, reports surfaced of inferior tires on Russian vehicles, shortages of fuel, and soldiers going hungry. Although it is easy to criticize these strains in logistics as avoidable, the inherent difficulties of supply and transportation under wartime conditions have factored into every conflict in history. This includes both the Soviet and German armies in 1942 in the same locations as the current Russian struggles. The fog and friction of war exacerbates what is already a difficult human undertaking: moving massive amounts of consumables and materiel forward in foreign territory, and metering throughput correctly despite uncertain timelines and requirements.

Logistics exists firmly in the physical realm. Even innovations that promise greater speed of transport or resupply, such as 3D printing, rely on matter and slurry for physical rendering. While information may slow the flow of logistics—disrupting command and control, scrambling signals, or denying data at the point of need—there is little to indicate that information can stop logistics. Many informational tools have helped better organize logistics, from the telegraph and the train of Von Moltke’s armies, to the Time Phased Force Deployment Data (TPFDD) of today’s joint force. In these cases, efficient command and control over logistical flow to the front lines provided great efficiency, however, combat kills efficiency. Civilian supply chains, the aforementioned system undergirding the success of the U.S. military in logistics, offer little to overcome a thinking enemy with weapons. Amazon has great efficiency and speed, but the company is not designed to deliver packages under fire.

Successful military logistics focuses on the human element. Logistics is a paradox. Ask most operational commanders what they want for battle and the answer will be more: more fuel, more munitions, more vehicles, more stuff. What matters most, however, are the humans; keeping humans hydrated, fed, clothed, supplied, and armed, in that order. In warfare, those militaries that can keep their humans alive in the chaos of combat succeed; those militaries that cannot do so fail. An egregious example of this was the Japanese effort to dislodge the Americans from Guadalcanal in 1942. Their much-vaunted Tokyo Express, consisting of destroyers and surface fleets, delivered ever-increasing numbers of soldiers and munitions to the island without proper sustenance. By the end of the campaign, the Japanese had thrust more than 30,000 soldiers into the fight…but failed to feed them. Many of those soldiers died, with the remainder unable to fight the rest of the war due to severe malnutrition.[3]

What lesson does this hold for the U.S. military? Do not forget the human element and basic human needs in your logistical priorities. An overwhelming desire for superiority in weapons systems and munitions can distract commanders and staffs from care and feeding of their human formations. Current defense planning circles discuss dispersion of logistics, but agile or distributed operational concepts will require careful thought on how to sustain the biological and moral needs of combatants. The joint force cannot expect to disperse via an exponential increase in operating bases and still supply all its troops equally or without interference from an adversary.

Military logistics relies on the capability and capacity of the commercial sector. While reliance on the commercial sector carries certain risks, there is truly no feasible alternative to maintaining reliance on the commercial sector. The military needs their commercial expertise, their supply chain acumen, and their vast transportation fleets. Although this seems like a modern concept, harnessing  commercial expertise for warfare is a time-tested element. As far back as the 18th century, the Spanish government turned to commercial industry to feed their beleaguered Army during the invasion of Minorca, and the British perfected a system of victualing to keep their expeditionary forces fed.[4] The most striking historical example was the Arsenal of Democracy the United States exported for itself and its allies during the Second World War. A massive economy out-producing and overwhelming the limited resources and isolated economies  of the Axis powers. Little has changed. The U.S. military still requires a massive industrial base and multiple methods of commercial transportation to support its expeditionary deployments. In the near future, the U.S. reliance on commercial capacity will continue for good or ill. Unfortunately, there is a lot of work to be done to build stronger partnerships between the DoD and a broader, more relevant cross-section of American industry. The U.S. military needs to harness more of the ingenuity, speed, and efficiency of commercial manufacturing, information technology, and distribution networks, while avoiding dependence on the same.  

With these broad principles as a baseline, the strategist and planner can better organize, train, and equip today’s forces for tomorrow’s war.  We offer five recommendations to help guide planning and thinking about logistics in warfare.

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Use historical lessons of logistics for future planning. Logistics always over-promises and under delivers. Every military has planned for operations its systems of logistics cannot support. The best example of a military outrunning its supply lines are the German experiences in both World Wars. For example, read through the assumptions in the Schlieffen Plan or the analysis of German preparation for the invading the Soviet Union in 1941 in Van Creveld’s magisterial Supplying War. As of March 2022, it appears the Russian military may have made similar strategic errors, neglecting logistics when planning for the campaign. U.S. forces should consider those errors and analyze their own plans. Logistics planning and execution should be part and parcel of wargames and exercises, rather than the practice observed by both authors of starting exercises with all assets already magically in the theater of war. Similarly, exercise designers should present logistics and flow challenges, and red teams should relentlessly attack logistical vulnerabilities. These practices in peacetime will strengthen logistics integration with operations and build better thinking for future crisis planning.

Embrace the failure of Command and Control. The first casualty in the logistics enterprise is command and control. As forces interact with the enemy and the environment, the need on the battlefield changes. This puts fog between the tactical need and the logistical supply. For example, in 2001 during the initial deployment of Marines into Afghanistan, there was no command-and-control system for logistics in place, it had to be built from scratch. Lt Col Broadmeadow, the head of logistics for the deployment stated, “It wasn’t like your normal logistics system, where you drop a requisition and things start to flow magically…very dependent on personal relations as opposed to systems.”[5] Any logistics officer involved in any campaign in the last three centuries would agree with that sentiment. To overcome this friction, military logisticians should practice with communications turned off, computer systems down, or in an information limited environment. The seams between the large strategic logistics organizations of United States Transportation Command and the Defense Logistics Agency and combatant command staffs, should be tested for low/no information environments. In recent air mobility exercises, these communication degradations drive players from a logistics mindset of pull, where the front lines ask for what they need, to a logistics mindset of push, where strategic commanders must give mission-type orders and clear, frequently-updated priorities so that operational and tactical commanders can prioritize.

Champion Autarky. The integration of commercial logistics networks optimized for peacetime efficiency has incubated a strategic weakness in United States military supply systems. Military planners must recognize the benefits of harnessing the ideas and capacity of commercial logistics, while clearly defining the limits of acceptable risk.  In other words, military planners must plan for attrition of transportation and supply enroute to the last tactical mile. The U.S. military must prioritize effectiveness (even at greater cost) to develop logistics systems and processes that are more self-reliant. For example, warehousing and storage, out of vogue for the last decades, will have to return in some form. This may also involve purchasing disposable means of transportation, such as submarines or unmanned aerial vehicles, that have capacity but are built for one-way trips. In addition, peacetime supply chains that depend on allied capability must be examined for resilience and mission assurance in wartime. Whatever can be produced or produced closer to the front lines, must be.

Turn precision on its head, and plan for brute force. In many cases, problems in logistics at the operational and tactical levels have been solved less by innovative technical solutions than by an equation of mass. Communications tools and computer networks often grind or break down on the battlefield. A typical response to this challenge is to force logistics into the equation: when in doubt, move more, move it again, and substitute labor and the possibility of waste for efficiency. The vaunted trains and timetables of the German Army of 1914 came apart in less than three days. The solution to broken transportation? Walk towards the Marne. When the fuel situation became critical in Afghanistan in 2008 due to threats to the lines of communication over the ground in Pakistan, the U.S. military decided to move fuel in by air.[6] This solution was expensive and inefficient but effective. Rather than focus procurement and planning on those technologies and processes that are more efficient, focus efforts on those things that will reliably increase mass and throughput in a crisis.

Redouble efforts to protect lines of communication. As the Russian military is learning in the Ukraine, control of the air is a necessary condition to protect supply lines. Since the beginning of the Second World War, those militaries that had control of the air had the upper hand on the movement of their own logistics and the destruction of their adversaries. The carrier battle group of the U.S. Navy is the archetype of the primacy of airpower over logistics as it protects the global commons through the range, speed, and striking power of aircraft. With the range and speed of modern hypersonic weapons, how can logistics planners protect future lines of supply? Are adversaries' capabilities in cyberspace enough to blunt transportation to the fight?

History is replete with examples of armies that failed to follow the basic tenet of supplying their forces in the field and lost. The apocryphal saying that “amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics” is less about an intellectual approach, or degrees of military professionalism, and more about a physical reality. Poor tactics may not always lose the battle, and outstanding logistics do not guarantee operational victory, but poor logistics consistently portend defeat. The U.S. military has not faced a major failure of logistics in the last 100 years. Can the Department of Defense prevent its asymmetric advantage in logistics from becoming an Achilles heel?

Michael Trimble is a U.S. Air Force officer and a C-130 pilot. Jobie Turner is currently a first officer at United Airlines and earned his PhD from Air University. This essay reflects their own views and not necessarily those of United Airlines, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This article appeared orginally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] "Defense Primer: United States Transportation Command," ed. Congressional Research Service (2021), 1.

[2] Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, 1st ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 108-09.

[3] Jobie Turner, "Guadalcanal August 1942 - February 1943: Alpha and Omega of Airpower,"  https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2017/2/9/guadalcanal-august-1942-february-1943-alpha-and-omega-of-airpower).

[4] Rafael Torres Sanchez, Military Entrepreneurs and the Spanish Contractor State in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 212.

[5] Lt Col John J. Broadmeadow interview with Christopher J. Warnke, 16 Jan 2002 (Oral History Collection), quoted in Nathan S. Lowrey, U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, 2001-2002: From the Sea (Washington, DC: History Division, United States Marine Corps, 2011), 133.

[6] Roxana Tiron, "$400 per gallon gas to drive debate over cost of war in Afghanistan," TheHill.com, https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-gas-another-cost-of-war-in-afghanistan-).