Digital age logistics systems still no panacea for troops.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

PROVIDING ESSENTIAL SUPPLIES and services to troops on the front lines ranks among those unglamorous jobs that everyone takes for granted, but increasingly consume larger bites of the Pentagon's half trillion-dollar annual budget.

In many ways, the Pentagon has improved its performance in the business of battlefield logistics--delivering transportation, food, medical care, equipment repairs and maintenance to troops in Iraq and other war zones. But the Pentagon "supply chain," which is now a $135 billion a year operation, continues to be plagued by what officials characterize as endemic inefficiencies that get in the way of customer service.

Senior officers in charge of battlefield logistics lament that after spending billions of dollars on information technologies that were supposed to increase efficiency, the results have been underwhelming. And more importantly, troops in combat are being shortchanged as a result.

Inefficiencies in the transportation system are one case in point, says Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz, head of the U.S. Transportation Command. His organization is responsible for moving people and cargo via air, ground and sea. But those in charge of managing military transportation assets cannot always make the best use of the available resources because their computer systems are not linked to supply or maintenance systems. So if passengers are being dropped off at a military base overseas, for example, transportation officers may not know that certain cargo at that location needs to be picked up as well.

The fragmented nature of transportation and supply operations ostensibly was to be fixed a decade ago, when the Defense Department and the military services began buying computer networks that would allow them to work together and share information. But the result of those efforts has been a proliferation of information systems that don't speak to each other, Schwartz tells an industry conference.

"Why do we have 300 information systems?" he asks. In Iraq, where the military services share bases, equipment and medical care facilities, disjointed systems create unnecessary administrative burdens. When Schwartz recently visited Balad, the largest U.S. military logistics hub in Iraq, he discovered that the Army and the Air Force were doing the same work but using entirely different systems and databases.

"Does that make sense? I don't think it does," he avers.

Another example of uneconomical use of transportation is the...