
US Navy officers tour a Defense Logistics Agency warehouse facility at Naval Air Station Sigonella, Sicily, Italy. (US Navy)
The health of US defence supply chains has become a growing concern in recent years amid the conflict in Ukraine and intensifying competition with China. “DoD [Department of Defense] supply chains are vital to US national security and defence strategy objectives,” Jay Brannam, executive director for the Munitions Industrial Base Task Force, emphasised during a panel at an Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Arlington, Virginia, on 15 January. “We must assume, and there's some evidence, that our adversaries are mapping our supply chains to degrade our warfighting capabilities and impair our ability to reconstitute them during the conflict.”
This kind of contested logistics is not “something that's going to happen to us when we shift to conflict. It's an aspect of competition that we're all enduring now that's having an impact on our ability to support the fight,” Lieutenant General Mark Simerly, commanding general of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), added.
DLA framework
Logistics capabilities are evolving to meet modern challenges in the same way as the military services, he said. DLA has developed a framework focused on people, precision, posture, and partnerships, to drive its modernisation, Lt Gen Simerly continued. The people element is focused on understanding combat conditions and “connecting with the warfighters … we have to develop leaders who value this collaboration and this transparency with industry all the way to the warfighters on the tactical edge”, he said.
Precision requires “the exquisite supply chain understanding and readiness understanding to make the right decisions”, he said. This is part of a shift from efficiency towards resilience.
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