Zachary S. Hughes
There is growing concern that the U.S. military is unable to deter or win a conflict with China in the Western Pacific. China’s sophisticated arsenal of long-range missiles is a lethal threat to America’s traditional way of deploying and employing expeditionary forces. With a rising sense of urgency, three U.S. military Services (Marines, Army, and Air Force) have embraced new concepts of operations that favor dispersed operations. On the surface, these ideas appear to restore survivability within the Pacific’s first island chain by making American formations harder to find and target. Unfortunately, these concepts are astonishingly logistics-intensive. Worse still, America’s military committed itself to these demanding concepts without full consideration of whether they were even logistically supportable. Now, evidence is emerging suggesting that each Service’s individual concept is probably logistically unsustainable. Even worse, each Service concept implicitly transfers risk from the Service to the joint force but without a clear accounting of how all these risks aggregate together. This is even more disturbing because a survey of historical Great Power wars—and a specific study of China’s likely military options—strongly suggests that logistics is likely to be the primary determinant of military success or failure. For dispersed operations to succeed in a contested logistics environment, the U.S. military must address the problem coherently as a joint force. This requires facilitating a culture and organizations that integrate logistics jointly at every level of warfare, while giving logistics pride of place in both force design and campaign planning.
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