By David Beaumont.

This is the second part of a presentation given at the Australian – New Zealand Defence Logistics Conference during June 2023. This conference convened to discuss supply chain resilience at a time of strategic competition. Part one can be found here.

Supply chains move and flex where demand exists. It is the role of the military logistician to govern the network of this lifeblood, for it determines how a force deploys, moves, and changes its scale and scope of tasks. Supply chains are the manifestation of the projection of military power with permanence; supply chains determine how far a force can go, how organised it will be and create both constraints and opportunities for commanders.

In 2003, as the US Army sped through Iraq, it was the tightening noose of an extended supply chain – one that many believed should be lean before the conflict – which forced an operational pause on the way to Baghdad. This was not only because of a lack of munitions, but military staples. Reports after the war sought a rethinking of assumptions about lean logistics and its relevance in contemporary, large scale, conflict.

Twenty years later, a completely unprepared military force attempted a shorter-range but ultimately similar push to a capital city – this time in Europe. The Russian advance to Kiev was a logistics shambles, a perfect example of how a failure to manage supply, maintenance and other aspects of logistics detracts from operational performance. It most certainly contributed to the stalling of the Russian advance and created vulnerabilities that the Ukrainian defence force exploited.

Some might argue that I am conflating the term ‘supply chain’ a bit, and that I am downplaying the role of agency of commanders and strategic decision makers in the way militaries tend to be prepared or deployed. There is nothing stopping a commander from deploying a force without the right equipment and the support, and we should not forget that militaries often operate well beyond the capacity for what they are prepared for in order to achieve an advantage.  However, this should not prevent us from doing our best to ensure militaries are logistically prepared and resilient.

Though our attention has been drawn to the ‘flashing klaxon’ that supply chain resilience, it is far from being a new issue. Signs of a system under strain have appeared in the paucity of certain small arms ammunition during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, body armour in East Timor, a litany of small-scale logistics issues which appeared in regional missions in the 1990s, and the debate about the sale of Australian Defence industry in the 1980s.

I’m sure, however, you will agree that the times warrant a revision of how we consider militaries to be prepared. We have been part of a world which has defined and measured supply-chains, if not logistics, as being effective because they are efficient – rather than because they are dependable. When this world has talked about resilience, it has been a conversation primarily focussed on developing plans for actions that should be undertaken post-disruption rather than whether treating preparedness problems in advance, or creating the organisations that are responsive in a crisis, adapt to regain the initiative, before delivering the desired result.

We have been part of a world which has defined and measured supply-chains, if not logistics, as being effective because they are efficient – rather than because they are dependable. When this world has talked about resilience, it has been a conversation primarily focussed on developing plans for actions that should be undertaken post-disruption. Today’s focus should be on treating preparedness problems in advance, or creating the organisations that will be responsive in a crisis, can adapt to regain the initiative, before delivering the desired result.

It is important to note that while we often use term ‘resilience’ – even in terms of being prepared – it hasn’t yet settled into commonplace use in terms of Western military doctrine.  In the ADF, the way we think about capability orients us to viewing our preparedness problems through the lens of what we can do in the present to ensure the right capabilities are available, at the right time for the right purpose in the future. To talk about preparedness is to talk about force structure, scalability, mobilisation and what constitutes realised capability that are ready for deployment.

Preparedness choices depend upon money and time, as much as they depend upon planners determining the operational need. In Australian Defence, the capability and operating budgets – irreconcilable, at times, lines of finding – create an arbitrary wedge between structural preparedness for the future (capability) and preparedness in a shorter timeframe (sustainment and operating costs etc.). These, in turn, determine many of the logistics requirements which underpin the development of military power.

It is extremely difficult to prepare for the short term while the focus is on long-term capability development when trade-offs are germane in a preparedness process constrained by the reality of a limited budget. The demands placed upon the systems that support military preparedness depend upon what outcomes are desired an in what timeframe. This applies to supply-chains as much as any other factor.

The Commandant of the USMC, General Berger, and the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Force Readiness, Kimberley Jackson, recently outlined that the US military required a substantial change in its readiness culture on the blog War on the Rocks. Conscious of the ‘art’ required in readiness decision-making, they advocate a new ‘strategic readiness framework’ to aid decision-making to better address the consequences of capability decisions on preparedness and the ‘cumulative effect of decisions’ on factors that arguably affect the ‘resilience’ of the force.

In Australia, we’re about to undertake a substantial rethink about how we prepare. This largely began in a burst of revelation in 2020, driven by a strategic policy update, the Australian Government and Defence proclaimed that the idea of ‘warning time’ was not fit for purpose in what would first seem a significant shake-up to preparedness planning. This concept of warning time was already on shaky ground; not necessarily because of the view that certain signals could be employed to trigger mobilisation activities, but because we employed ‘warning time’ as a fixed number (in this case ten years) and did not have a detailed plan to act when strategic circumstances changed.  

A preparedness philosophy based around warning time was a feature of Australian defence planning in the 1980’s and 1990’s. However, the ‘defence of Australia’ doctrine which emblemised this preparedness approach was subject to withering critique in the early 1990s for failing to properly address the logistics activities of mobilisation. Government accepted war-stocks were lacking, and advocated for the development of national support concepts and improved civil-military interaction. However, because ‘warning time’ was believed to be available, only half-hearted attempts to develop mobilisation concepts were undertaken.

Then again, defence preparedness planning has always been characterised by mental workarounds and human behaviours amid a lack of investment as much as it has by a failure to act on triggers. Logistics problems – like the resilience of supply-chains – tend to be ignored while the going is good. When high-cost capability projects gain the interest of Defence Ministers, those activities related to sustainment and different budgets tend to fall by the wayside.

Furthermore, militaries, conscious of the cost to realise preparedness objectives, have a habit of optimistically producing preparedness concepts based on assumptions about what can logistically achieved prior to an operation.

Preparedness approaches concerning warning time are replete with assumptions about what national support (such as civil transportation or stores and equipment) can be obtained to fill deficiencies, the assumption of limitless capacity of global defence industry to provision war-stocks, and the infinite flexibility of supply-chains to adapt to the sudden demand of defence mobilisation.

History shows how little time we really get to act, assuming signals of future war are ignored or fail to engender activity in militaries. One study of twentieth-century conflicts since 1939 found that the average time between the ‘first indication of war and the firing of the first shots has been 14.3 months’, with smaller-scale contingencies around 10.6 months and that there ‘is a 50% probability that conflict can occur in less than four months.’[1]

Australia’s largest military commitment since the Second World War, the INTERFET mission in 1999, required the ADF to lead a coalition of 10000 personnel. This deployment – which included the NZDF as a major partner – occurred with the broader part of the ADF having less than two weeks to openly prepare, acknowledging that some logistics planning occurred up to nine months prior to the operation.

In this operation, the ADF developed its logistics architecture ‘on the run’, developed supply arrangements in a chaotic arrangement and in a disorganised environment. The ADF’s supply system was enduring a restructure after ten years of commercialisation, logistics information systems were patently inadequate and unable to determine what was moving where, a lack of logistics personnel inhibited responsiveness, and the appropriate leaders in logistics planning were not identified. The situation was so bad that that successive internal and external reviews were undertaken to identify where logistics preparedness failures lay in the years that followed the operation.  

As I have inferred in the introduction, the concept of ‘resilience’ proposes a different way of looking at military logistics performance. Resilience is concerned with the adaptability of organisations and how they responding to uncertainty; its about how systems, groups and individuals deal with the stress of things not going as they might despite whatever preparations are made. This does not mean that preparations are not important, but that planners should be mindful that circumstances change.

You might try to argue that the INTERFET mission was a display of logistics resilience. That the ADF was able to adapt to circumstances might suggest that it was logistically ‘resilient’, but good luck and ‘brute force’ approach to logistics – dispatching as much as you can when you can – are not defining features of an effective and resilience approach to supply. The absence of failure is not reflective of a state of success!

Recent public emergencies have seen the idea of ‘resilience’ proliferate in the national consciousness, and it is understandable that the topic would permeate military discussions about preparedness. In Australia, the idea of resilience emerged from post-national disaster discussions about the restoration of ‘normality’ following traumatic events as early as 2011. Much like we see with supply-chains and wealth-making globalisation, the interdependency that modern society requires to seemingly function created a complexity which amplified the impact of catastrophic disasters and other problems.

It is natural that we would gravitate towards the idea that strategic resilience is about maintaining a buffer for emergencies. Inevitably, and for sensible reasons, the topic of national reserves or stocks (or, in the military’s case, ‘war stocks’) has been raised over the last few years. Stockholdings of strategically significant commodities are critically important for national resilience, just as they are for military operations – something recently enshrined in the Defence Strategic Review in Australia.

But we can’t forget that reserves are an important constituent of supply-chains rather than an alternative. In some cases, the maintenance of unnecessary stock levels may actually detract from preparedness and resilience; vast quantities of inappropriate strategic reserves consume money and other resources that can be used in other critical areas. Such reserves take time to manage, and when flooding a supply-chain in a crisis – as occurred during East Timor – excessive stocks ossify the supply-chain and prevent it from functioning as it should.

This means that we should not fall victim to the assumption that the modern age of war is one where ‘efficiency’ has no place, for it is only through efficiency and productivity that we can maximise the limited logistics resources we have. The solution to our problems is not more stuff; it’s thinking smarter about what it means for a military to be prepared, and how this Force can be resilient at the same time.

This series will conclude with part three soon.

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[1] Speedy, I.M. ‘The Trident of Neptune’, Defence Force Journal, 1978, pp 7-16 cited in Ball, D., Problems of mobilisation in defence of Australia, Phoenix Defence Publications, Australia, 1979, p 13