Contractor employees at Iowa Army Ammunition Plant prepare 155 mm artillery rounds to be filled as a part of the load, assemble and pack operation. (Photo by JMC)
In early October, when Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel, two US Navy destroyers were strategically in place in the Mediterranean Sea. The USS Bulkeley and USS Cole fired off a dozen interceptors to aid in Israel’s defense. Those interceptors, which proved their life-saving abilities, cost up to $30 million a copy. Each one takes years to build.
In an era of on-demand everything, a reasonable American might think that the expenditure of this costly, munition, immediately kicked off replenishment at the Alabama factory where it’s made. One might reasonably assume that a sophisticated tracking, production, and resupply system keeps our servicemembers armed and our military at a heightened state of readiness.
The reasonable American, conditioned to these expectations by the suggestive powers of “smart” homes, cars, grocery shopping apps, and more, would be completely wrong.
Today, no such system is in place and it often takes years to replenish weapons used on the battlefield. The American factory is separated from the fight. This gap must be closed, the need is urgent, and the technology to fix this is available.
Historically, this type of system wasn’t actually needed. For most of human history, armies lived off the land. They acquired food and supplies from local populations. Armies stashed supplies at magazines, transported equipment like artillery, and acquired goods and services from sutlers and camp followers. Likewise, navies operating far from home ports relied on local supplies of fresh water, food, and naval stores.
Pre-industrial forces, therefore, lacked the logistical umbilical cord that stretches back to home territory. Logistics was a local affair conducted by forces in the field, rather than supplied by a dedicated corps. This created freedom of maneuver at the cost of the ability to sustain large forces in the field over time.
The second industrial revolution changed all of this. It freed up labor and created the means to outfit huge forces with materiel. Railroads and steamships could quickly and reliably transport these armies, along with their increasingly sophisticated equipment and supplies over great distances. Telegraphs allowed for rapid communication of orders and logistical requests.
Armies and navies still acquired some supplies locally, but on balance, sustainment now came over supply lines.
This change propelled the emergence of a standing military staff to manage the complexity of industrial logistics. Militaries created large supply corps and dedicated infrastructure to keep forces and equipment sustained in the field. As military operations became larger and more far-flung, these processes and organizations expanded in size and complexity to keep pace. Over time, this specialization increasingly divorced rear-area support functions from frontline combat forces.
Which is why today, the supply chain and the kill chain are separate, distinct functions in the American military.
There have been some modest technology advancements to help connect logisticians to warfighters, but nothing has bridged the gap between supply and demand. Rather, we remain largely stuck in a 20th century model in which combat forces rely on a distant and labor-intensive process to provide them with materiel, ranging from bombs to blood, when and where it is needed.
The separated military functions of supply and demand systems have created bloat in civilian and military bureaucracy and a disconnect between what the warfighter needs and America is producing that does not exist in the commercial sector. The sad reality is that because the Pentagon does not typically invest in technology for the “staff functions” of DoD, the on-demand technology in the hands of an American consumer right now is more powerful than that in the hands of an American logistics officer.
The good news is that changing this requires exactly zero new authorities from Congress, acquisition reforms, changes to the FAR, or new blue star commissions. The military can solve this today by leveraging the same software and AI that the commercial sector has relied upon for decades.
Today, units manually calculate supply consumption and communicate it to the next echelon. Resupply is then aggregated across units and fed into plans, at which point they are locked in for that planning cycle. As a result of this slow, sequential process, forward-deployed units often depend on establishing surpluses of supply in theater—surpluses that we now know are difficult to maintain, and that are vulnerable to disruption in a contested environment. The supply chains and manufacturers that ultimately power these operations have rationally organized around this intermittent cadence.
Now imagine a process that runs more like the always-on systems Americans have come to expect in every other industry.
In the case of Navy missiles fired in the Mediterranean, the weapons used in the kill chain are Standard Missile-2 (SM-2) surface-to-air missiles, built by Raytheon and fired using a Vertical Launcher System (VLS). That VLS would be equipped with software to measure SM-2 expenditures, allowing accurate inventory and consumption to be readily visible across echelons. These same command and control (C2) systems would provide proactive recommendations on replenishment actions for the supply chain, transforming unreliable stockpiling into data-backed predictive logistics.
This can and should be replicated across a variety of weapons systems and other critical equipment.
The harder piece will be fully restoring the size and strength of the American industrial base to meet the production and manufacturing demands that today’s challenging global environment requires. There are signs that a resurgence is underway, but a full transformation of American production cannot take place without a clear and sustained demand signal from the Pentagon.
Making the changes described here actually helps this big challenge. Sending industry a much earlier demand signal and reducing delays in getting industry gears turning is the goal. Furthermore, everything purchased under DoD’s Operations & Maintenance account—repairs, fuel, medical supplies, and more—enjoys significantly more flexibility in terms of DoD’s flexibility and discretion to buy when needed.
You simply have to look at the attendance at this month’s Reagan National Defense Forum to see that American companies, old and new, are rising up to meet the needs of the warfighters. It is incumbent on military leaders to put in place the efficient, direct, real-time connectivity between what those companies supply and what our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians need for today’s fight, and tomorrow’s.
Tara Murphy Dougherty is the CEO of Govini.
