Monday, May 12, 2014

Reducing Our Logistics Footprint

Recently, an article in the Army Times examined how the Army plans to reduce its global footprint at the same time it maintains pre-positioned "mountains" of supplies and equipment around the world in order to speed deployments.

Currently, the way these stockpiles are positioned implies that they are more static, impinging our ability to rapidly deploy to hotspots or disaster areas. This indicates that the costs of transportation from these global dumps to forward-deployed units is higher than it could be. General Odierno seeks to streamline this by moving away from the planning for conventional conflict.

As we move into an era of asymmetric warfare and face more insurgency and terrorism based adversaries, it makes sense that we have smaller stocks of supplies for our contingency forces. The way General Odierno plans to break these massive supply dumps up is into smaller unit-based sets. Instead of a unit deploying to a region, and then getting supply pushed to it, these smaller dumps would be pre-positioned with the units' major end-items already there, such that the unit itself can simply pick up its gear and move out.

This is also beneficial to the lowest end of the spectrum of conflict. In the case of a civil defense or humanitarian assistance mission, Army units can simply move to an area and begin distribution of life-saving food, medicine, and water; with all of this materiel closer than it was before, the Army will be more mission-ready and spend less on shipping.

1 comment:

  1. Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems as though you relied on the video to make your point. You clearly know what youre talking about, why waste your intelligence on just posting videos to your blog when you could be giving us something informative to read?
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