jhungary
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Upon seeing some head-banging idea on Military Logistic on this forum, I felt the need to compel me to write this article to clear out the concept of Battlefield Logistic. So member here can have a basic knowledge on how Military Logistic Works..
Unfortunately, this is a highly specialised subject and i am not trained for it, I was only trained in basic logistic support as part of my OCS and AIT course, so i can only touch the subject briefly, but i am not going to be able to cover it in deep. So, let's look at how Military Logistic works, shall we?
Principle of Military Logistic
When I was over there in Iraq, our base have a very big PX (Post Exchange), PX is like a supermarket back home, where you can find daily necessity for sale in a store like place. Item like toothbrush, Q tips, to belt, to clothing, to playing card, to CDs or Games. It's just like your local Safeway or Whole Food.
But ever wonder how a toothbrush are being transport from Stateside to Iraq??
Well, to understand how Military Logistic Works, one need to understand several thing first, for example, the need for combat and the service require for combat. Well, you cant supply what you do not know, so you need to know the necessity in war to be able to learn further
Basically, there are many discipline with Military Logistic, but today we are going to only focus on Combat Service Support, also known as Combat Sustainment Support
The principle of Combat Service Support
Basically, the meaning of Combat Service Support is a network to support and sustain combat operation, IT should not be however, confused with Combat Support Services, which service such as Military Intelligence, Engineering and Military Police Services. Combat Service Support. Combat Service Support defined as essential capabilities, functions, activities, and tasks necessary to sustain all elements of operating forces in theatre at all levels of war. Which based on the Principle of Sustainment
Principle of Sustainment
The eight principles of sustainment are essential to maintaining combat power, enabling strategic and operational reach, and providing Army forces with endurance. While these principles are independent, they are also interrelated, according to U.S. Army Doctrine Publication 4-0 the 8 principle are as follows:
1. Integration is combining all of the elements of sustainment (tasks, functions, systems, processes, organizations) to operations assuring unity of command and effort. Army forces integrate sustainment with joint forces and multinational operations to maximize the complementary and reinforcing effects from each Service and national resources.
2. Anticipation is the ability to foresee operational requirements and initiate actions that satisfy a response without waiting for an operations order or fragmentary order. Sustainment commanders and staffs visualize future operations, identify required support and start the process of acquiring the sustainment that best supports the operation.
3. Responsiveness is the ability to react to changing requirements and respond to meet the needs to maintain support. Through responsive sustainment, commanders maintain operational focus and pressure, set the tempo of friendly operations to prevent exhaustion, replace ineffective units, and extend operational reach.
4. Simplicity relates to processes and procedures to minimize the complexity of sustainment. Clarity of tasks, standardized and interoperable procedures, and clearly defined command relationships contribute to simplicity.
5. Economy is providing sustainment resources in an efficient manner to enable a commander to employ all assets to achieve the greatest effect possible. It is achieved through efficient management and discipline, prioritizing and allocating resources, and capitalizing on joint interdependencies. It can also be achieved by contracting for support or using host nation resources to reduce or eliminate the use of military resources.
6. Survivability is all aspects of protecting personnel, weapons, and supplies while simultaneously deceiving the enemy (JP 3-34). Survivability consists of a quality or capability of military forces which permits then to avoid or withstand hostile actions or environmental conditions while retaining the ability to fulfil their primary mission. In mitigating risks and minimizing disruptions to sustainment, commanders often must rely on the use of redundant sustainment capabilities and alternative support plans.
7. Continuity is the uninterrupted provision of sustainment across all levels of war. It is achieved through a system of integrated and focused networks linking sustainment across the levels of war, other Service support capabilities, and to operations. It assures confidence in sustainment allowing commanders’ freedom of action, operational reach and prolonged endurance.
8. Improvisation is the ability to adapt sustainment operations to unexpected situations or circumstances affecting a mission. It includes creating, inventing, arranging, or fabricating what is needed from what is available. The sustainment commander must apply operational art to visualize complex operations and understand what is possible at the tactical level. These skills enable commanders to improvise operational and tactical actions when enemy actions unexpected events disrupt sustainment operations.
Notice that the principle of logistic is also the principle of sustainment.
To be able to sustain an operation, what basically needed is to keep the troop in operation supply, and there herein lies the logistic management and the hard calculation of what would be enough.
This, on the other hand, brought the support issue to a whole new question. How much support you need to conduct one forward operation? The answer lies in the Loss of Strength Gradient.
The Loss of Strength Gradient
The LSG is an assumption a country's ability to project strength on an forward operation, and the distant between deployment decrease the power projected by any given country to conduct operation, the loss of power is projected thru a positive digression as the distant increase.
But the projection of the loss of strength discounted the terrain where a land based country attack another land based country would suffer the same loss with either a land base country attacking an island, even tho land route would make supply easier than solely depend on Naval Route.
But the principle still holds as the aggressor country would have to limit the attacking force for resupply purpose but regardless, if that attacking force in sum is larger than the defending force, the principle stated that the defending country should resort to pursuit the conflict non-violently.
Case Studies 1 - Operation black bucks.
Operation Black Buck is an United Kingdom's RAF bombing campaign during the Falkland's Conflict. The use of 2 vulcan bombers to bomb target in Falklands from RAF bases in Ascension Islands highlight the Loss of Strength by the RAF.
In this diagram, it explain the concept of using 11 Victor Air Refueller to provide the 2 Vulcan for the 8 refuelling (7 Inbound 1 Outbound) on the 13000km Round trip. That equate to 15% combat power to 85% support power ratio.
Indeed, if you were to talk about technological advancement, Say you replace a vulcan to a B-52, its combat range is doubled so your can take off 25% of support force, or with a better tanker, that would increase the efficiency by a margin. However, the ratio or gradient would not change much (2 B-52H would require a pair of KC-10 to refuel, 1 inbound 1 outbound hence the gradient is 50% for the same distance)
And that number is just a brief calculation, we have also discounted the crew to service the bomber, and the crew to service the tanker too.
Face Value of Logistic
First of all, before we begin to even talk about how to manage logistic, we need to talk about how important is logistic support to a running battlefield. Since ancient time, battle have been fought and won(or lost) by logistic management. Even as early as the time where Roman and Hannibal (The term Logistic came from Greek Logistikos) where they would use baggage train and horse wagon to transport and allocate the combat resource.
To understand the face value of the logistic, one have to understand the face value of the force. Where a country (say country A) can put in a force on paper, (say 300,000 men and 5000 Tanks) that does not translate to they can put/deliver the same force and support them thru battle, assuming it is an offensive battle.
Factually, you cannot have a 100% fighting force, if you do, then when the soldier expand all that they carry, they cease to exist as a fighting force. At some point, the deployment force have to have some non-combatant to take care of the logistic need
What we discussed is the Loss of Strength Gradient, so naturally, the further the distant you go, the ratio between fighting force and logistic force would more or less equal (i.e. 50/50) and sometime (in fact, most of the time) or even less (i.e. 40/60)
Logistic Limitation
Where everything comes with a limit, logistic is no exception, first relationship is, the longer your supply line is, the longer it take to reach you. Ship's the preferred method
The second limitation is the continuation. Supply must comes continuously, and there cannot be any interruption. If you cannot supply your troop in a regular basis, then when the supply runs out, they no longer able to fight. This leads to a fairly common doctrine of any army and any war - The Attack/Defence of Supply Line. Hence, supply not only have to ship out from your depot regularly, but you also have to guard it, the longer your supply line is, technically, the larger of force is needed to ensure your soldier in the front line get what it needs.
The third limitation is one that many people or planner forget, and that is logistic works both ways, you don't just supply your forward deployed troop, but sometime, most of the time, you also need to consider the reverse logistic. Especially when the aggressive party depend on the materiel from the occupation country, and attacking raw resource going back is a lot more effective than attacking incoming force or incoming logistic, since without those materiel going back to the aggressor, they cannot even make war...
Case Study 2 - WW2 Pacific Campaign
During WW2, the Imperial Japanese Military rely on Tin, Rubber, Oil and Aluminium to maintain their war effort. The Japanese depended on the Oil in Dutch Indies (Now Indonesia), Rubber and Tin in Malaya and Aluminium and Iron in Manchu.
The allied thus first cut off the direct supply line of Oil, by directly hack across Philippine. Oil being the most important resource of all, simply without oil, tank don't run, plane don't run and above all, ships don't run, so even if they still occupied Malaya or Manchu, cutting off oil mean even if you still produce Tin, Rubber or Iron, there are no mean for you to transport it back to Japan Home Island.
With the fall of Philippine, the US deploy a Submarine Blockade, thus limiting the oil supply line to Japan, so by doing this, they do not need to invade Dutch Indies, Malaya and Manchu to effectively take the war economy of Imperial Japan down to next to nothing.
This show the important of defending your own supply line and in the same context, attack your enemy's supply line. However, the vital information is missing here, as ship and planes leave port/airport every hour and every day, it's impossible to escort each and every ship and plane when they leave port or airport and heading to their destination, and you cannot run the risk either as supply have to be maintain continuously.
Stockpile vs. Just in Time system.
During WW2, the convoy system is to battle the need for defending Merchant ship against German Submarine attack, where you stack up a bunch of ship and put them into a convoy formation, thus stacking up supply and then wait for the next batch of ship depart the harbor and move to forward position with its escort.
This system have been in place for ages, even before WW2, the system runs like your local supermarket and they get dispatches once a week or so, then shelf the item and wait for it to sale, and on a second week, the same truck came in and refill the item, regardless whether or not your item have been all sold, if not, they may sell it a sale price.
But to do this, you would have accumulate a lot of item at the same time, and there is a risk that if the item have been sold out before the second week, then the rest f the week would have to go without said item.
Looking at battlefield logistic, where everything have a priority, where as fuel and ammo on top of the list, And leisure item would be quite further down on the list. Now, there is one question you want to ask, if we can classified and prioritize the need of our troop, then we can deliver just enough item to the front and match it with the supply date. in deed, that system is called Just in Time System.
Classification of Materiel
Class I - Rations - Subsistence (food), gratuitous (free) health and comfort items.
Class II - Expendables
Class III - POL - Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants (POL)
Class IV - Construction materials
Class V - Ammunition
Class VI - Personal demand items
Class VII - Major end items
Class VIII - Medical material
Class IX - Repair parts and components
Class X - Material to support non military programs
Miscellaneous - Water, salvage, and captured material.
Once we group the class, then we can manage the delivery for each item category. Say, if this base usually used up 2 load of Class III and 1 load of Class V in any given weeks, you will then order those two item, in the exact quantity and with all the detail of other item, you will save a lot of works, resource and money sorting thru those Resupply.
In come Performance Base Logistic.
What it basically does is this, you have a set of rules and guideline to follow for a daily basis, and what you have to do is to take care of the long term performance (Which I explained above) and the need to adjust the system to perform with a acceptable result.
The concept of performance base logistic is a life cycle of support strategies for weapon system. Use the life cycle to deliver product support as an integrated, affordable performance package designed to optimize system readiness. PBL meets performance goals for a weapon system through a support structure based on long-term performance
Conclusion
The success of any given operation does not lies in how many troop you have, or so called paper strength, but it rather depends on how many troop you can put into battlefield, and above all, how many troop you can support.
The chances the world will see another World War scale conflict is extremely slim, the logistic game for what there is would not be as great as multiple country under general mobilisation. But in fact, we would see a smaller but better supplied force battling rather a larger force that would need to push the logistical skill of one country to the limits.
And the advent of technological advance could also spell success and failure to any given military operation, but above all, the logistic and supply would still remain as a battleground that win or lose a war for a country, for years to come.
Thank you for your time and support, I hope to see you all in my next article.
Unfortunately, this is a highly specialised subject and i am not trained for it, I was only trained in basic logistic support as part of my OCS and AIT course, so i can only touch the subject briefly, but i am not going to be able to cover it in deep. So, let's look at how Military Logistic works, shall we?
Principle of Military Logistic
When I was over there in Iraq, our base have a very big PX (Post Exchange), PX is like a supermarket back home, where you can find daily necessity for sale in a store like place. Item like toothbrush, Q tips, to belt, to clothing, to playing card, to CDs or Games. It's just like your local Safeway or Whole Food.
But ever wonder how a toothbrush are being transport from Stateside to Iraq??
Well, to understand how Military Logistic Works, one need to understand several thing first, for example, the need for combat and the service require for combat. Well, you cant supply what you do not know, so you need to know the necessity in war to be able to learn further
Basically, there are many discipline with Military Logistic, but today we are going to only focus on Combat Service Support, also known as Combat Sustainment Support
The principle of Combat Service Support
Basically, the meaning of Combat Service Support is a network to support and sustain combat operation, IT should not be however, confused with Combat Support Services, which service such as Military Intelligence, Engineering and Military Police Services. Combat Service Support. Combat Service Support defined as essential capabilities, functions, activities, and tasks necessary to sustain all elements of operating forces in theatre at all levels of war. Which based on the Principle of Sustainment
Principle of Sustainment
The eight principles of sustainment are essential to maintaining combat power, enabling strategic and operational reach, and providing Army forces with endurance. While these principles are independent, they are also interrelated, according to U.S. Army Doctrine Publication 4-0 the 8 principle are as follows:
1. Integration is combining all of the elements of sustainment (tasks, functions, systems, processes, organizations) to operations assuring unity of command and effort. Army forces integrate sustainment with joint forces and multinational operations to maximize the complementary and reinforcing effects from each Service and national resources.
2. Anticipation is the ability to foresee operational requirements and initiate actions that satisfy a response without waiting for an operations order or fragmentary order. Sustainment commanders and staffs visualize future operations, identify required support and start the process of acquiring the sustainment that best supports the operation.
3. Responsiveness is the ability to react to changing requirements and respond to meet the needs to maintain support. Through responsive sustainment, commanders maintain operational focus and pressure, set the tempo of friendly operations to prevent exhaustion, replace ineffective units, and extend operational reach.
4. Simplicity relates to processes and procedures to minimize the complexity of sustainment. Clarity of tasks, standardized and interoperable procedures, and clearly defined command relationships contribute to simplicity.
5. Economy is providing sustainment resources in an efficient manner to enable a commander to employ all assets to achieve the greatest effect possible. It is achieved through efficient management and discipline, prioritizing and allocating resources, and capitalizing on joint interdependencies. It can also be achieved by contracting for support or using host nation resources to reduce or eliminate the use of military resources.
6. Survivability is all aspects of protecting personnel, weapons, and supplies while simultaneously deceiving the enemy (JP 3-34). Survivability consists of a quality or capability of military forces which permits then to avoid or withstand hostile actions or environmental conditions while retaining the ability to fulfil their primary mission. In mitigating risks and minimizing disruptions to sustainment, commanders often must rely on the use of redundant sustainment capabilities and alternative support plans.
7. Continuity is the uninterrupted provision of sustainment across all levels of war. It is achieved through a system of integrated and focused networks linking sustainment across the levels of war, other Service support capabilities, and to operations. It assures confidence in sustainment allowing commanders’ freedom of action, operational reach and prolonged endurance.
8. Improvisation is the ability to adapt sustainment operations to unexpected situations or circumstances affecting a mission. It includes creating, inventing, arranging, or fabricating what is needed from what is available. The sustainment commander must apply operational art to visualize complex operations and understand what is possible at the tactical level. These skills enable commanders to improvise operational and tactical actions when enemy actions unexpected events disrupt sustainment operations.
Notice that the principle of logistic is also the principle of sustainment.
To be able to sustain an operation, what basically needed is to keep the troop in operation supply, and there herein lies the logistic management and the hard calculation of what would be enough.
This, on the other hand, brought the support issue to a whole new question. How much support you need to conduct one forward operation? The answer lies in the Loss of Strength Gradient.
The Loss of Strength Gradient
The LSG is an assumption a country's ability to project strength on an forward operation, and the distant between deployment decrease the power projected by any given country to conduct operation, the loss of power is projected thru a positive digression as the distant increase.
But the projection of the loss of strength discounted the terrain where a land based country attack another land based country would suffer the same loss with either a land base country attacking an island, even tho land route would make supply easier than solely depend on Naval Route.
But the principle still holds as the aggressor country would have to limit the attacking force for resupply purpose but regardless, if that attacking force in sum is larger than the defending force, the principle stated that the defending country should resort to pursuit the conflict non-violently.
Case Studies 1 - Operation black bucks.
Operation Black Buck is an United Kingdom's RAF bombing campaign during the Falkland's Conflict. The use of 2 vulcan bombers to bomb target in Falklands from RAF bases in Ascension Islands highlight the Loss of Strength by the RAF.
In this diagram, it explain the concept of using 11 Victor Air Refueller to provide the 2 Vulcan for the 8 refuelling (7 Inbound 1 Outbound) on the 13000km Round trip. That equate to 15% combat power to 85% support power ratio.
Indeed, if you were to talk about technological advancement, Say you replace a vulcan to a B-52, its combat range is doubled so your can take off 25% of support force, or with a better tanker, that would increase the efficiency by a margin. However, the ratio or gradient would not change much (2 B-52H would require a pair of KC-10 to refuel, 1 inbound 1 outbound hence the gradient is 50% for the same distance)
And that number is just a brief calculation, we have also discounted the crew to service the bomber, and the crew to service the tanker too.
Face Value of Logistic
First of all, before we begin to even talk about how to manage logistic, we need to talk about how important is logistic support to a running battlefield. Since ancient time, battle have been fought and won(or lost) by logistic management. Even as early as the time where Roman and Hannibal (The term Logistic came from Greek Logistikos) where they would use baggage train and horse wagon to transport and allocate the combat resource.
To understand the face value of the logistic, one have to understand the face value of the force. Where a country (say country A) can put in a force on paper, (say 300,000 men and 5000 Tanks) that does not translate to they can put/deliver the same force and support them thru battle, assuming it is an offensive battle.
Factually, you cannot have a 100% fighting force, if you do, then when the soldier expand all that they carry, they cease to exist as a fighting force. At some point, the deployment force have to have some non-combatant to take care of the logistic need
What we discussed is the Loss of Strength Gradient, so naturally, the further the distant you go, the ratio between fighting force and logistic force would more or less equal (i.e. 50/50) and sometime (in fact, most of the time) or even less (i.e. 40/60)
Logistic Limitation
Where everything comes with a limit, logistic is no exception, first relationship is, the longer your supply line is, the longer it take to reach you. Ship's the preferred method
The second limitation is the continuation. Supply must comes continuously, and there cannot be any interruption. If you cannot supply your troop in a regular basis, then when the supply runs out, they no longer able to fight. This leads to a fairly common doctrine of any army and any war - The Attack/Defence of Supply Line. Hence, supply not only have to ship out from your depot regularly, but you also have to guard it, the longer your supply line is, technically, the larger of force is needed to ensure your soldier in the front line get what it needs.
The third limitation is one that many people or planner forget, and that is logistic works both ways, you don't just supply your forward deployed troop, but sometime, most of the time, you also need to consider the reverse logistic. Especially when the aggressive party depend on the materiel from the occupation country, and attacking raw resource going back is a lot more effective than attacking incoming force or incoming logistic, since without those materiel going back to the aggressor, they cannot even make war...
Case Study 2 - WW2 Pacific Campaign
During WW2, the Imperial Japanese Military rely on Tin, Rubber, Oil and Aluminium to maintain their war effort. The Japanese depended on the Oil in Dutch Indies (Now Indonesia), Rubber and Tin in Malaya and Aluminium and Iron in Manchu.
The allied thus first cut off the direct supply line of Oil, by directly hack across Philippine. Oil being the most important resource of all, simply without oil, tank don't run, plane don't run and above all, ships don't run, so even if they still occupied Malaya or Manchu, cutting off oil mean even if you still produce Tin, Rubber or Iron, there are no mean for you to transport it back to Japan Home Island.
With the fall of Philippine, the US deploy a Submarine Blockade, thus limiting the oil supply line to Japan, so by doing this, they do not need to invade Dutch Indies, Malaya and Manchu to effectively take the war economy of Imperial Japan down to next to nothing.
This show the important of defending your own supply line and in the same context, attack your enemy's supply line. However, the vital information is missing here, as ship and planes leave port/airport every hour and every day, it's impossible to escort each and every ship and plane when they leave port or airport and heading to their destination, and you cannot run the risk either as supply have to be maintain continuously.
Stockpile vs. Just in Time system.
During WW2, the convoy system is to battle the need for defending Merchant ship against German Submarine attack, where you stack up a bunch of ship and put them into a convoy formation, thus stacking up supply and then wait for the next batch of ship depart the harbor and move to forward position with its escort.
This system have been in place for ages, even before WW2, the system runs like your local supermarket and they get dispatches once a week or so, then shelf the item and wait for it to sale, and on a second week, the same truck came in and refill the item, regardless whether or not your item have been all sold, if not, they may sell it a sale price.
But to do this, you would have accumulate a lot of item at the same time, and there is a risk that if the item have been sold out before the second week, then the rest f the week would have to go without said item.
Looking at battlefield logistic, where everything have a priority, where as fuel and ammo on top of the list, And leisure item would be quite further down on the list. Now, there is one question you want to ask, if we can classified and prioritize the need of our troop, then we can deliver just enough item to the front and match it with the supply date. in deed, that system is called Just in Time System.
Classification of Materiel
Class I - Rations - Subsistence (food), gratuitous (free) health and comfort items.
Class II - Expendables
Class III - POL - Petroleum, Oil and Lubricants (POL)
Class IV - Construction materials
Class V - Ammunition
Class VI - Personal demand items
Class VII - Major end items
Class VIII - Medical material
Class IX - Repair parts and components
Class X - Material to support non military programs
Miscellaneous - Water, salvage, and captured material.
Once we group the class, then we can manage the delivery for each item category. Say, if this base usually used up 2 load of Class III and 1 load of Class V in any given weeks, you will then order those two item, in the exact quantity and with all the detail of other item, you will save a lot of works, resource and money sorting thru those Resupply.
In come Performance Base Logistic.
What it basically does is this, you have a set of rules and guideline to follow for a daily basis, and what you have to do is to take care of the long term performance (Which I explained above) and the need to adjust the system to perform with a acceptable result.
The concept of performance base logistic is a life cycle of support strategies for weapon system. Use the life cycle to deliver product support as an integrated, affordable performance package designed to optimize system readiness. PBL meets performance goals for a weapon system through a support structure based on long-term performance
Conclusion
The success of any given operation does not lies in how many troop you have, or so called paper strength, but it rather depends on how many troop you can put into battlefield, and above all, how many troop you can support.
The chances the world will see another World War scale conflict is extremely slim, the logistic game for what there is would not be as great as multiple country under general mobilisation. But in fact, we would see a smaller but better supplied force battling rather a larger force that would need to push the logistical skill of one country to the limits.
And the advent of technological advance could also spell success and failure to any given military operation, but above all, the logistic and supply would still remain as a battleground that win or lose a war for a country, for years to come.
Thank you for your time and support, I hope to see you all in my next article.
