Battlefield logistics: color it 'purple'.

• Author: Farell, Lawrence P., Jr.
• Position: President's Perspective - Editorial

As pressure intensifies at the Defense Department to improve logistics support to U.S. troops in the field, decision makers within the military services, Joint staff and combatant commands are stepping up efforts to fix immediate problems and try to develop long-term solutions.

These are difficult problems, to say the least. During peacetime, the Defense Department measures the performance of its logistics system in "customer wait-time," a term that describes how long soldiers have to wait to receive parts or supplies they requested. When a shooting war is under way, however, customer wait-time is not necessarily relevant. As long as troops remain engaged in hotspots such as Iraq and Afghanistan, the challenge facing the Defense Department and the services is to make the system responsive to the needs of the forces in the field.

As I noted in a previous editorial, ("War Realities Call for New Approach to Logistics," April 2004), the fundamental challenge confronting logisticians and senior leaders is that the current logistics apparatus, designed for the battlefields of the Cold War, does not work as well in combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan where there are no defined frontlines.

The "just in case" logistics practices, as seen in the first Gulf War, no longer are tolerable. Under that approach, supplies are ordered multiple times, just in case the previous orders got lost in the shuffle, or delayed in the transportation pipeline. When supplies arrive in theatre, a major effort is required to match the right supply with the right unit.

On the other hand, a more efficient "just in time logistics" may not be desirable during a war either, because our systems are not able to accurately predict consumption and respond to supply requests in real time.

At a recent Army-industry conference hosted by NDIA in Atlanta, top leaders from the Defense Department and the private sector agreed that the rules that govern logistics in peacetime and in commercial businesses do not apply when the customers are troops in combat.

Lt. Gen. Claude Christianson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics, explained that the U.S. military has a very effective strategic distribution system, but does not understand theater distribution. In peacetime, he said, we try to make things as efficient as possible. In combat, what matters is effectiveness.

This level of effectiveness--good enough to respond to combat needs--only can be achieved if the services and...