Logistics and C2: Honesty, Truth and Pragmatism

“And you should have seen the trucks on the road to Gabès. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they crawled along those son-of-a-bitch roads, never stopping, never deviating from their course with shells bursting all around them. Many of the men drove over 40 consecutive hours….. Without them the fight would have been lost.”

General George S Patton might have heaped laurels on the fighting GI, but he was also a huge advocate for those that supplied, sustained and produced for the army of World War II. It is an interesting and common facet of successful WW2 generals that they understood logistics in a different way to military leaders after that generation. The era of protracted wars in which they fought (and led) was a hard teacher about the importance of each element of the military machine.

In the ‘quick’ campaigns of the 20^th and 21^st Century, the chief concern of commanders has been in the build-up phase of a campaign. The execution phase was, by comparison with longer wars, was unchallenged over the logistics chain and easily resupplied. This is also the focus of staff training for logistics officers in war colleges and defence academies around the world today: that the preparation phase is everything. Having what a force needs to initiate a campaign is one thing, but sustaining that force during the advance, on the defensive, and through the fight that follows has a different set of requirements: it also requires a different set of conversations between commanders and their G4 (logistics staff).

It is unfortunate that in training commanders and HQ staff today, the short war games played today focus on starting a war, and not in sustaining it over the long term. A commander who takes over a fight in the third year of a contested campaign will come upon a completely different set of considerations, restrictions, and hurdles that were not clear to those who started it. And yet current professional Military Education is failing to prepare both the logisticians and the commanders for anything other than phase one of a military campaign.

The reality of supply and sustainment, and the scarcity of resources in any long war, requires a different mindset for a commander and his staff. As Bernard Montgomery found in Normandy, the greatest constraint on a commander’s actions and planning might be the realities of logistics and resources (human and material) rather than the topography or the adversary.

The realities of protracted campaigns – whether existential or not – require a different set of conversations between commanders and their logistics staff: one governed by honesty, truth and pragmatism rather than slavish adherence to a commander’s desire. In order to enable a chosen plan after the initial foray of a campaign, the staff need a comprehensive, real-time accounting for stocks and supplies that will be available to make various COAs work. That might start with ammo supplies and allocations from echelon, but will also include POL, people, and systems as well as those external elements of support that might be drawn on (engineering, aviation, air defence, strike, high levels of ISR, et al). Each of these aspects will also have a logistics ‘tail’ associated with them, much of which will be specialist and bespoke.

There is a high degree of specialist knowledge required for each of these systems: it is not something that a generic G4 will have a deep intrinsic understanding of. Previously, most Western militaries retained specialist logistics staff that could provide such information, ensure that the ‘tail’ was matched to the location and activities of the system, and liaise with external providers to ensure spares and supplies were readily available. More recent ‘efficiency’ measures implemented into military institutions has sought to insert business practice into military institutions, especially in the areas of logistics and supply chain management. The end result has been to remove knowledge, understanding, and resilience from the military system, favouring a just-in-time approach instead. For some areas, this has raised considerable ‘savings’ but it has also reduced specialist knowledge, and introduced fragility and brittleness into logistics and resupply systems.

In an era when protracted wars are increasingly likely, and as defence spending is increasing, there are some immediate implications beyond the obvious and immediate actions already being advicated:

1. Buy-back resilience in military systems through stockpiling of spares and supplies for each system,
2. Reinstitute specialist logistics knowledge and understanding in staff,
3. Exploit commercial-off-the-shelf systems of accounting and stock management to enable better shared understanding of equipment and supplies that will inform planning across the force, and
4. Drive PME and wargames to examine protracted wars, and to start midway through campaigns rather than enabling commanders to practice planning and execution based on perfect logistics, supply, and personnel situations.

Until the above are addressed (and they are merely a starting point in rebuilding the military tool in many states), the development and acquisition of new equipment and systems will not deliver an effective fighting force. Even then, that fighting force will still depend on the drivers, chefs, medics, engineers, MPs, and technicians. The realities of war cannot be undone on the basis of hoping that technology will mysteriously provide an answer.