The Long Haul

hen Hollywood writes the script, the combat troops' stories are told, their sacrifices and heroics recounted.

But behind every front-line fighter labors an army of logisticians. The battle's outcome often turns upon their competence. They are the soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen whose jobs are rarely featured on recruiting posters; the civilians and contractors who move the materiel and manage the supply lines. They track spare parts, repair broken equipment, deliver food and ammunition and build bases and airfields in places few Americans could find on a map. They drive the trucks, pilot the aircraft and crew the ships that haul the equipment and supplies that fuel the fight. Their jobs may not be glamorous, but they are critical to American hegemony today.

Powerful logistics operations long have been part of the American way of war. Historians maintain that superior resources and supply management were crucial to the Union victory in the Civil War. During World War II, captured German officers heading for POW camps were astonished to see endless streams of vehicles and supplies moving to the front. But wealth alone is only part of the story. Innovation also has been crucial to the way the "loggies" pave the combat soldier's path to victory.

"Any [military] campaign's operational limits are set by logistics," says Lt. Gen. Charles Mahan, the Army's chief logistician. "That's in Afghanistan, it's in the global war on terrorism, it's in what we do every single day." Significant reductions in U.S. forces over the last decade, especially in troops and equipment based overseas, have dramatically complicated the job of moving troops and supplies to the battlefield. In recent years, a smaller U.S.-based force has had to respond rapidly to crises worldwide, often in remote regions where roads, airfields and seaports are primitive, if they exist at all.

The Defense Department increasingly turns to private companies for help, sometimes with mixed results. A draft report from the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff obtained by Government Executive is highly critical of some aspects of support provided by contractors during military operations in Afghanistan. The draft report, which reviews operations of the Defense Logistics Agency, found that some contractors hired by DLA delivered supplies late or in insufficient quantities, posing unacceptable risks for ground troops. While some officers worry that civilians don't feel the same sense of urgency and dedication that motivates those in uniform, contracting isn't likely to go away for both budgetary and political reasons. By relying more on companies, DLA has cut more than 40,000 people from its rolls over the last 15 years to about 23,000 today, the vast majority of whom are civilian employees.

Tracking supplies on the battlefield is one of the most difficult challenges facing the Army and Marine Corps, Mahan recently told an audience of soldiers and contractors at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, an Army interest group, in Washington. He lauded U.S. logistics operations as the most sophisticated in the world, and yet, "none of us in this room believes they are good enough today," particularly in the far-flung missions presented by the war against terrorism, he said. Problems tracking supplies early in the Afghanistan campaign disrupted tactical planning by field commanders who could not count on having the right equipment and supplies on hand. "We could not find stuff that we knew was in the [supply chain] queue," Mahan said.

It wasn't the first time U.S. military officials encountered problems tracking supplies. Twelve years ago, Defense Department planners pulled off one of the most significant logistical feats in history, moving half a million troops and nearly 10 million tons of cargo and petroleum products halfway around the globe in a matter of months. The buildup to the 1991 Persian Gulf War was remarkable for its scope-it was the equivalent of relocating the entire city of Atlanta, Ga., with all its people, food, cars and other belongings, to sites more than 10,000 miles away.

But trying to find anything among the nearly 4 million tons of dry cargo that had been shipped to the desert was another matter. U.S supply officials in Saudi Arabia were forced to crawl through thousands of shipping containers because there was no other way to determine what was inside. The containers had to be opened, inventoried and resealed after they arrived in the desert, hampering operations and frustrating troops. If Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had not given the United States and its allies five months to prepare for war, the consequences could have been severe.

Military planners have gone to school on the lessons of the 1991 war with Iraq, but the nature of warfare is such that there continually will be new lessons to learn. Every military operation is unique and the circumstances in which the United States finds itself today as it wages a war on terrorism and prepares for another war against Iraq are different from any other time in history. While the United States maintains fewer bases and troops in Europe than it did a decade ago, it has more equipment pre-positioned throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Weapons today are more powerful and precise than in the past, vastly reducing the amount of ammunition the military might need to haul to the battlefield. But at the same time, troops rely more on electronic gear, requiring them to deploy with large quantities of heavy batteries. And much of the Army's equipment has become heavier, posing other problems for logisticians. Perhaps most important, U.S. military interests are no long concentrated in a couple of regions, but span the globe.

"The front line has moved," says Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime expert in military affairs. Donnelly believes that just as the United States maintained a significant military presence in Europe throughout the Cold War, the military increasingly will be needed to maintain America's pre-eminence today. "If you want to effect long-term political change it's not something you can do from a distance. You can't do it without convincing people you're around for the long haul," he says.