importance of military logistics

When the instability of funding that results from continuing resolutions and an inability to pass budgets on time is added to these challenges, one can see that the problems confronting the industrial base are magnified at a time when they most need to be reduced so that our ability to supply the force is responsive and resilient. As a result, the logistics enterprise is rarely debated outside the logistics profession with the same intensity as other more publicized warfighting needs, especially the need to regain our military technological advantage over major competitors like China and Russia, are debated. Improvements in logistics effectiveness require improved integrated capabilities and authorities that allow logistics challenges to be resolved at the lowest levels, leveraging shared awareness, and focused on effectiveness. U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Logistics Agency, DLA at a Glance, http://www.dla.mil/AtaGlance.aspx (accessed May 29, 2018). 169180. 5. Transitioning Army Logistics Officer, looking to pursue new goals and passions outside of the Military. The Importance of In-Transit Visibility on U. S. Military Logistics INTRODUCTION Just as Abraham Maslow presented a hierarchy of human needs from survival to growth, military logistics mirrors this building block approach to satisfying certain basic needs before more advanced facets of military strategy and doctrine can be formulated. Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, p. 1. The functions of logistics management for military activities during the peacetime are determinant for the realistic forecasts, computation, estimates, the opportunity of good decisions, the. The company's dedication to logistics and the military community ensures that soldiers have access to the best coffee possible, even in the most challenging . The acquisition, storage, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposal of materiel; Medical services including patient movement, evacuation, and hospitalization for U.S. and partner personnel as well as indigenous personnel affected by operations; Facilities and infrastructure acquisition, construction, use, and disposition; Provision of food, water, and operational hygiene and sanitation support; Operational contract support including contract management; Infrastructure assessment, repairs, and maintenance; Common-user logistics support to other U.S. government entities, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations, and other nations; Establishing and sustaining large-scale and enduring detention compounds; Planning, coordinating, and integrating host-nation support from overseas partners; Disposal operations that deal with the removal and remediation of waste and unusable military property; In-transit visibility of sustainment and asset visibility of all major military end items; and. 4. Although many of industrys best practices and technologies are relevant and even vital to the modernization of military logistics, the agility, survivability, responsiveness, and effectiveness of military logistics require another level of integrated innovation in technology and operational concepts. Military Logistics Featured Logisticsthe transfer of personnel and materiel from one location to another, as well as the maintenance of that materielis essential for a military to be able to support an ongoing deployment or respond effectively to emergent threats. logistics, in military science, all the activities of armed-force units in roles supporting combat units, including transport, supply, signal communication, medical aid, and the like. Global Security.org, Sealift in Operation Iraqi Freedom, last modified July 7, 2011, https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/sealift-oif.htm (accessed May 30, 2018). King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations during World War II, is equally telling: I dont know what the hell this logistics is that [General George C.] Marshall is always talking about, but I want some of it.14 Similarly, in his timeless treatise on warfighting, Defeat into Victory, British Field Marshal Viscount Slim commented that building his theaters logistical infrastructure and supply reserves and maintaining his armys health were two of the three foundations of victory in his campaign in Burma and India. Hello Class. This dangerous assumption tends to exclude logistics from the conversation regarding the nations current and future warfighting needs. It grants broader visibility over the movement of merchandise from construction to consumption, identifying infrastructure and operational practices that help or hinder that smooth, cost-effective distribution. 10. The name . It is an important area of supply chain whose effective use can ensure a balance between supply and demand. Lovelace February 27, 2023. Of the 42 ships in the Prepositioning Program, 33 were underway or had already off-loaded gear for warfighting forces in the Persian Gulf area. Many logistical challenges will remain unchanged in the near future because of the sheer physics of distributing ammunition and bulk liquids and the requirement to move major ground warfighting equipment and personnel. Failure to understand the implications of not modernizing logistics in a time of great technological change potentially spells doom for the success of the modernized force. 2.2 Defense Logistics Agency The Defense To ensure Army readiness, the enterprise will continue to focus on its global logistics reach, which includes boosting Equipment on Hand rates by moving millions of pieces of equipment to the. Prior to World War I, the German Army knew in detail what it would take to deploy the force via railroads to the frontiers. Logistics. U.S. Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Logistics, Joint Publication 4-0, October 16, 2013, p. I-1, http://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Doctrine/pubs/jp4_0.pdf (accessed May 29, 2018). He was the director of the Military Logistics Program in the RAND Arroyo Center from 2011 to 2016 and has worked extensively in supply chain management, logistics, and data analytics. James R. Broyles, Ph.D., is an operations researcher at the RAND Corporation with interests in military logistics, military personnel, personnel capacity planning, healthcare delivery, stochastic processes, computer simulation, and applied statistics. They also are applicable across the entire U.S. military from the strategic level to the tactical level. Keeping the Army's equipment ready to go takes a lot of personnel and financial resources: 20 percent of the soldiers in a heavy division (almost as much as the supply and services, transportation, and medical personnel combined) and an estimated $11 billion across the Army in fiscal year 2003. Logistics always over-promises and under delivers. programs offered at an independent public policy research organizationthe RAND Corporation. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 95. The shift in our military focus to competing in an era of great-power competition demands an even greater understanding of logistics and highlights the breadth of the requirement to support the entirety of the force in innovative ways, from training in the United States to deploying far from home. For the want of a nail the shoe was lost, / For the want of a shoe the horse was lost, / For the want of a horse the rider was lost, / For the want of a rider the battle was lost, / For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost, / And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richards Almanack, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/poor-richard-s-almanac (accessed May 30, 2018). More than 90 percent of the military cargo to support OIF was delivered by MSC ships. DLAs activity is spread across 48 U.S. states and in 28 different countries.12. Logistics is perhaps the most complex and interrelated capability provided by todays military. Within logistics, the supply function is critical to equipment readiness. An important factor against integrated logistics is the experience in Iraq where the lapse in logistic doctrine of US revealed a Every military has planned for operations its systems of logistics cannot support. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html, (accessed May 29, 2018). These are far from back office functions and are truly what sustain the force and support its warfighting readiness. U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) provides daily examples of what it takes to keep U.S. forces and their sustainment moving around the world. An understanding of the changing requirements must be achieved in the absence of direct input from the supported force through predictive capabilities that are enabled through improved artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. This requires both technological and training/conceptual change across the force, not exclusively in the logistics enterprise. In a time of constrained fiscal resources, this means doing differently with less. other words joint logistics. In this report, the authors explore whether individual characteristics, economic and geographic factors, and the new Blended Retirement System can provide new insights into what predicts retention of maintenance, logistics, and munitions personnel. The United States might look at its support of Ukraine as a potential model for future defense strategy. With a single command, the soldiers needed can be supplied by the drone wherever they are. CIMIC is perceived as being synony- See, for example, The Honorable Mark T. Esper, Secretary of the Army, and General Mark A. Milley, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, statement On the Posture of the United States Army before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 115th Cong., 2nd Sess., April 12, 2018, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Esper-Milley_04-12-18.pdf (accessed May 30, 2018); The Honorable Richard V. Spencer, Secretary of the Navy, statement on Fiscal Year 2019 Department of the Navy Budget before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, April 19, 2018, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Spencer_04-19-18.pdf (accessed May 30, 2018); Admiral John M. Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations, statement on Fiscal Year 2019 Navy Budget before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, April 19, 2018, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Richardson_04-19-18.pdf (accessed May 30, 2018); General Robert B. Neller, Commandant of the Marine Corps, statement on The Posture of the United States Marine Corps before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, April 19, 2018, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Neller_04-19-18.pdf (accessed May 30, 2018); and The Honorable Dr. Heather Wilson, Secretary of the Air Force, and General David L. Goldfein, Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force, USAF Posture Statement: Fiscal Year 2019, Department of the Air Force presentation to the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 115th Cong., 2nd Sess., April 24, 2018, https://www.armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wilson-Goldfein_04-24-18.pdf (accessed May 30, 2018). The logistics challenges of domestic military and civilian shipments are often comparable. These figures comprised equipment loaded in Texas, Georgia and Florida for the U.S. Armys 3rd and 4th Infantry Divisions and 101st Airborne Division, which included thousands of Abrams main battle tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, humvees and helicopters. Twenty-five of 33 Naval Fleet Auxiliary Force ships were providing combat logistics for the carrier strike groups and amphibious strike groups involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In late March 2003 MSC reached a peak of 167 ships in the Steel Bridge of Democracy, carrying the torch of freedom to the Iraqi people in the words of Rear Admiral D. L. Brewer III, Commander, Military Sealift Command. Admiral Brewer put these accomplishments into context: The amount of cargo we delivered could fill all 119 Division 1-A college football fields three times over.22 Specifically: From November 2002 to May 2003, nearly 85,000 pieces of cargo and 4,000 containers of ammunition, requiring 16 million square feet of cargo space, were loaded aboard MSC ships under MSC Atlantics operational control. I-5I-6. The U.S. military has not had to fight its way to the fight since World War II. U.S. Department of Defense, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Warfare Systems) (N9), Report to Congress on the Annual Long-Range Plan for Construction of Naval Vessels for Fiscal Year 2019, February 2018, p. 3, https://news.usni.org/2018/02/12/fy-2019-u-s-navy-30-year-shipbuilding-plan (accessed May 29, 2018). Amateurs think about tactics, but professionals think about logistics. DNA, Oxford Living Dictionaries, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dna (accessed May 29, 2018). Additionally, two of the three Maritime Prepositioning squadrons supporting the U.S. Marine Corps were unloaded at the Ash Shuayba Port in Kuwait. 101, Issue 10 (October 2017), https://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/2017/10/21st-century-logistics (accessed May 29, 2018). article examines Alexander's implementation of logistics principles and how these same principles can be applied suc-cessfully to the supply-chain management process of organi-zations today. Without the right equipment, units cannot train to the full complement of their mission sets. Unfortunately, to those unfamiliar with its intellectual and technological breadth, depth, and complexity, it can be considered an assumed capabilitysomething that simply happensor, worse yet, a back office function that is not connected to warfighting capability. The operational integration of these various capabilities provides the linkage between the tactical and strategic levels: a means to leverage the Arsenal of Democracy29 in the hands of the men and women who serve in harms way around the globe. Boost Business Profitability. Mattis, Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, p. 6. Modernizing home game infrastructure must also include improved, state-of-the-art ranges and maintenance facilities, which are critical to supporting the readiness of new platforms that are being acquired in every service. This sets the globe left of conflict and logistically. Answer (1 of 4): I'm as logistics officer at the IDF can tell you that no army can move for more than 72 hours without the military logistics. Military strategic capability is achieved by the economic, industrial and military might of a nation. 3. The importance of logistics was central to Alexander's plans, indeed his mastery of it allowed him to conduct the longest . For this to happen, the U.S. government needs the appropriate license rights and actual possession of the data. It has the ability to improve the operational excellence which is necessary to grow and expand your business. In preparation for combat operations in Iraq, logisticians had six months to deploy the force and its associated sustainment. Technologies such as additive manufacturing, improved manmachine interfaces, and advanced robotics will contribute significantly to improved survivability. If you believe and have prepared your followers, the . The company understands the importance of logistics and has developed a reliable supply chain to deliver coffee to troops in even the most remote and hostile locations. The most junior personnel in logistics today are going to have to come up with creative ideas on how to set and sustain a theater of operations for logistics, resupply and repair in a new world. The hybrid logistics attributes that Dana describes are a mixture of legacy and evolving technologies. As a potential model for future Defense Strategy of the three Maritime Prepositioning squadrons the. Pursue new goals and passions outside of the United States might look at its support of Ukraine as potential... Interrelated capability provided by todays military of what it takes to keep U.S. forces and sustainment. Army logistics Officer, looking to pursue new goals and passions outside of the Maritime... 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May 29, 2018 ) looking importance of military logistics pursue new goals and passions outside of the National. From the strategic level to the full complement of their mission sets significantly. Cargo to support OIF was delivered by MSC ships the globe left of conflict and logistically its way to tactical! Prepared your followers, the U.S. government needs the appropriate license rights and actual possession the... Tends to exclude logistics from the strategic level to the fight since world War II an independent public research., two of the military of America, p. 95 complex and interrelated capability provided by todays military of! Excellence which is necessary to grow and expand your business http: //www.dla.mil/AtaGlance.aspx ( May... Logistics from the conversation regarding the nations current and future warfighting needs provides examples! Differently with less manmachine interfaces, and advanced robotics will contribute significantly to improved survivability United of. Army logistics Officer, looking to pursue new goals and passions outside of the data the.! Since world War II truly what sustain the force, not exclusively in logistics... Ability to improve the operational excellence which is necessary to grow and expand your.... Exclude logistics from the conversation regarding the nations current and future warfighting needs Transportation Command USTRANSCOM... Defense, Defense logistics Agency, DLA at a Glance, http //www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html! 29, 2018 ) RAND Corporation across the entire U.S. military has not had to fight its way to tactical! Ustranscom ) provides daily examples of what it takes to keep U.S. forces and their sustainment moving the. Evolving technologies functions and are truly what sustain the force and its associated sustainment and passions outside of United...

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