Panel Underscores Logistics, Operations Challenges

By Daisy R. Khalifa, Special Correspondent

Operations leadership from the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed a wide range of topics relating to the wartime shipment of goods during a military logistics panel May 6 at the Sea-Air-Space Exposition.

Panelists provided details from the past seven years on the various and complex logistics approaches for the massive transport of goods to troops in Iraq and on transportation supply chains, while also anticipating the shift of troops and equipment from Iraq to Afghanistan as well as engaging in a “responsible drawdown and resetting” of the U.S. military as forces return home.

Marine Lt. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., deputy commandant for plans, policies and operations, focused on past challenges, and applied the events and lessons learned to deployment efforts going forward in Afghanistan.

“The one thing that I think six or seven years experience gives us is a pretty wide range of tactical challenges that we have experienced, and, thus, a pretty wide range of logistics challenges,” said Dunford. “What I wouldn’t want to do is forget some of the capability gaps that we identified 2003. There are still some things that are left to be addressed.”

Dunford said, for example, the United States did not pay as much attention as it should have to the tactical end of the equation during the early stages of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Operation Iraq Freedom I (OIF I) exposed a number of significant shortfalls in our capability. The investment that we made in command and control (C2) was inadequate — and I’m talking about everything from operation centers that didn’t exist down to radios that were not in vehicles.”

As for Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), Dunford said the military is operating “very much at the platoon level.”

“There is a degree of austerity in Afghanistan that makes it a much different fight than Iraq,” he said, characterizing the terrain as “a moonscape,” whereby, “we don’t need to build a hotel or a Burger King, but we need to address the fuel challenges, we need to address the water challenges, we need to figure out how to maintain our equipment, and we need to build our expeditionary capability.

“[In Afghanistan], we need to think about the battalion command and the lieutenant commander in charge who doesn’t have time to do it,” said Dunford. “We need to think about logistics, we need to think about how to solve his problems, we need to think about how to do things for him and pretty much get away from a request-centered logistics process.”

Maj. Gen. Kevin A. Leonard, deputy chief of staff for logistics and operations for U.S. Army Materiel Command, focused on the challenges of not just getting to war, but how troops and supplies will be shipped back home, as well as the shift into Afghanistan. He described the Army’s oversight of goods and services on behalf of OIF I, and gave specifics on what logisticians are doing every day in the effort at present.

Leonard said Army logisticians manage about 6.1 million supply requests, distribute $695 million worth of goods, drive more than 3,300 vehicles about 660,000 miles and feed three meals to a population equal to that of Baltimore on a daily basis.

“This is stuff moving into the battlefield that happens every day and it is a huge success story that is largely transparent to the American public,” said Leonard, who then turned his discussion to the massive task ahead of returning troops and goods back home from the battlefield.

“For seven years, we’ve been pushing materials out to Iraq and 139,000 military personnel,” said Leonard, who talked of having “a responsible drawdown and responsible reset of the U.S. Army.”

He provided a summary analysis of what he believed needs to be accomplished in order to return from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“It isn’t that we’ve been irresponsible before, but I would submit to you that the U.S. Army has not done redeployment, reset and reconstitution of its force in this magnitude in any meaningful way since after Vietnam, and it took a long time to recover from that,” Leonard said.

Vice Adm. Alan S. Thompson, director of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), provided the perspective from his agency, which is represented around the world and is the military’s largest troop support supplier. DLA provides fuel, subsistence, uniforms, military clothing, medical supplies and construction materials to servicemen and women abroad. The agency also provides significant support for the hardware used by the armed forces as well as a number of service-type functions, such as distribution, disposal and reutilization of material once it is no longer needed.

Like Leonard, Thompson talked about the responsible drawdown of troops and supplies, and cited DLA’s robust distribution center in Kuwait from which it provides direct support into Iraq.

“Clearly it is going to be a big challenge with movement of retrograde material,” said Thompson. “The Army has one size, supersize. They have a massive amount of equipment and material on the ground in Iraq.”

Thompson said much of that material ultimately will go through a process of disposal, donations to Iraq and getting rid of hazardous material, and he said DLA now is accepting about 25 million pounds of material at its processing sites in Iraq, and it expects that to grow dramatically.

In looking to Afghanistan, Thompson said the focus is to try to establish a support capability for a substantial number of troops, as well as moving their equipment and materiel over to the region. He noted that in the southern part of the country, it is something of a team effort between DLA, NATO and the military services, and that DLA and U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) are working under the umbrella of U.S. Central Command.

“It is initially about building the operating bases,” said Thompson. “We’ve been focused for a number of months on quickly moving in large volumes of construction materials [to build these] operating bases, and at the same time we need to posture for long-term support by moving in sustainment type supplies.”

Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael C. Gould, director J-3, at TRANSCOM, said his command's role is to interact with all the various combatant commands.

“We spend an awful lot of time with them to learn what it is they need moved, where they need it moved and when it needs to get there,” said Gould, who described TRANSCOM’s global presence in terms of efforts that involve, among other things, six brigades moving simultaneously, and providing an air refueling function with a tanker bridge set-up where 5 million pounds of fuel is dispensed per day.

TRANSCOM, Gould said, is dedicated to “velocity and precision. If a piece of equipment needs to be delivered immediately, we are going to fly it from factory to foxhole.”

The command's mission, he said, is executed through a process called "fusion" in which it “fuses” operations for transportation by gathering players together to collaboratively discuss requirements. Gould also acknowledged the command’s commercial partners and said “most of what moves through TRANSCOM moves by commercial means.”

Army Lt. Gen. Kathleen M. Gainey, director for logistics, J-4, on the Joint Staff, rounded out the with a unique perspective on global collaboration, particularly in light of OEF. She acknowledged new challenges that the U.S. armed forces stand to face in places such as Africa and in other regions around the world, which she described as akin to the U.S. military's experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We need to work together, because we cannot do it alone,” said Gainey. “Resources are constrained, forces are constrained and when you go into these units and you look around, you are going to see the Marines embedded right in the middle of an Army unit because that is how we are going to fight in the future.

“Now need to go beyond just joint. We need to go to our multinational and interagency partners. We’re not going to be going it alone ever again, because it is going to be that combined capability that is going to give the United States authenticity for why we are even on the battlefield. Because it is that international coalition that is going to be able to drive the change and a consensus for the world to help influence where we are going,” Gainey said.