Loss of Afghanistan Bases Highlights Promise of Predictive Analytics to Offset Vulnerability of Expeditionary Aerospace Logistics

Our loss of access to bases in Afghanistan should remind us of the vulnerabilities of expeditionary logistics and supply chains to sudden disruption—and the need to move beyond just-in-time delivery systems that have brought us efficiency at the cost of robustness. Our aerospace forces need a better way to predict what spare parts will be needed, when, and where.

Moreover, the stakes are rising with the growing potential for great power conflict; our near-peer strategic competitors will not willingly grant sufficient reaction time to rely on just-in-time deliveries. The loss of sustainable bases in Central Asia highlights the imperative to ensure aerospace parts supply chains better support the U.S. Air Force’s focus on distributed operations in contested environments.

The Air Force has been interested in predictive analytics for some time, inspired by Delta Airlines’ success with predictive analytics’ application to commercial aircraft fleet maintenance. In 2018, Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, then head of Air Force Materiel Command, called predictive maintenance a “must-do for us.” Since then, the Air Force has made significant progress by expanding the use of predictive analytics, starting by gathering historical data across the force and using machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect patterns. Then the service creates workable analytical models, using algorithms to predict parts requirements in advance of parts’ failures. Some of this work can be done organically within the service; some work requires contractors specializing in analytics or data management.

Principal challenges to embracing predictive analytics include the upfront cost of gathering historical data across the force. This process generates a vast proliferation of unusually sensitive data, to which data management and cybersecurity tools must be applied to use and protect the data. Secure cloud-based logistics can be leveraged to connect the expeditionary aerospace forces to logistics nodes and contract logistics providers no matter where they are deployed.

But the service must expand its efforts across its fleets and weapons systems, a time-intensive and painstaking process, if for no other reason than the collection and analysis of relevant data requires 18-to-24 months for each weapons system. Current Air Force plans incrementally add weapons systems to the predictive maintenance program; expansion to each weapons system requires collecting, understanding, and applying the fleet-specific data. At the current rate of expansion, the predictive maintenance program is projected well into the current decade. Moving faster will require tens of millions of dollars in additional funding for the service.

One example of a predictive analytics tool is GE Aviation’s Brilliant Pricing technology. By feeding historical pricing data for defense equipment into neural networks and using artificial intelligence to predict outcomes, Brilliant Pricing can predict future parts prices in just 15 percent of the time that it currently takes, saving paperwork and cutting delivery times for parts as well as end-items. Other defense contractors have expressed interest in adopting a similar system; the result could represent a revolutionary expansion of the speed and efficiency of aerospace parts logistics.

Our Afghanistan experience tells us that sustainable forward basing and reliable supply chains are dangerously vulnerable to evolving threats. Commercially proven predictive analytics tools can enable our aerospace forces to cope with aerospace spare parts logistics challenges. The current crisis compels us to leverage predictive analytics to increase the efficiency and counter disruption of our aerospace spare parts supply chains. All this means a more complicated system for getting parts where they need to go. But the costs of complexity will be outweighed by improvements in readiness and robustness.

John Adams, U.S. Army Brigadier General (Retired), is president of Guardian Six LLC and a former Deputy U.S. Military Representative to NATO’s Military Committee. He is a writer on national security and defense issues and was the lead author for the influential report on the U.S. defense industrial base, “Remaking American Security.”