U.S. forces' toughest foe: Logistics

[thedrifter]

U.S. forces' toughest foe: Logistics

Only GI ingenuity ensured victory in Iraq, analysis finds


Thursday, January 22, 2004


BY DAVID WOOD
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. military juggernaut that swept into Iraq last March was plagued by shortages of ammunition, spare parts and fuel, an epic logistics mess for which the old military term "snafu" might have been invented.

Battalions of tanks and armored vehicles, dashing forward under grueling conditions, got no repair parts for three weeks. Broken-down vehicles had to be stripped of usable parts and left behind. Some units ran dangerously low on ammunition and couldn't get resupplied; others in desperate need of M-16 and machine gun rounds got unneeded tank shells instead, according to logistics officers. Some troops had virtually no water while receiving truckloads of stuff they didn't need and couldn't carry.

"We weren't as effective as we could be," the Army's logistics chief, Lt. Gen. Claude V. Christianson, acknowledged in an interview.

In a devastating self-critique, Christianson and his staff have produced an analysis that concludes, in essence, that the Army's logisticians can't see what is needed on the battlefield, can't respond rapidly when they do find out what's needed, and can't distribute what they have when it's needed.

Christianson, who ran the war's logistics operation from Kuwait before he was brought back to the Pentagon to fix the mess, confirmed that these problems will require scarce money and sustained attention to fix.

But the supply problems were exacerbated, officers said, by the decision of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to deploy mostly combat units in the weeks before the invasion, and to hold back Army and Marine Corps logistics and support units until weeks or months later -- gambling that the war would be over quickly enough that sustained resupply wouldn't be needed. Rumsfeld and his top commanders have justified these decisions as tactically sound.

According to combat units' after-action reports, the supply sequencing was a genuine problem.

Even now, nine months after the fall of Baghdad, it takes the Army 34 to 38 days to move a requested spare part from a depot in the United States to the soldier in Iraq who needs it.

During the war, it was worse.

Days into combat, with tank and mechanized infantry units streaking across empty desert toward Baghdad and then fighting into the city, the Army struggled to send forward ammo and water in huge truck convoys that quickly came under fire on unguarded two- lane highways. Soon, the 400 miles between Kuwait and Baghdad were nearly impassable with stalled traffic.

That meant combat units couldn't evacuate their wounded by road, the 3rd Infantry Division reported, and had to compete for scarce helicopter space instead.

Combat engineers struggled to build fortified supply depots along the way but lacked critical equipment and supplies, which "extended the time troops were operating while exposed to enemy fires," according to an after-combat report by the U.S. Army Engineer School at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

With some combat units like the 3rd Infantry Division desperately short of water, ammo, spare parts and food, crates and pallets of supplies piled up at depots and ports in Kuwait. At least $1.2 billion worth of supplies got lost, according to an audit by the General Accounting Office.

Then the Army ran out of trucks.

American forces managed to prevail only because of the "creative ability of individual soldiers to pull the pieces together," Gen. Paul Kern, who oversees Army supplies and maintenance, said in an interview. "They are heroes."

Until the problems are fixed, U.S. military operations are subject to the same snafus that threatened the campaign to topple Saddam Hussein:


When troops are on the move on distant battlefields, the Army doesn't know which supplies are running low because there are no reliable, fast communications between front-line units and the rear. As a result, Army logisticians ship a mix of fuel, tires, ammunition and food according to what planners working years ago imagined units might need.

The fix: a new satellite communications system dedicated to logistics, and data links tracking supplies from depot to user.


Once the Army figures out what soldiers actually need, it can't get the materiel to the battlefield, and can't distribute it to individual units when it arrives. There is no military equivalent of FedEx or United Parcel Service on the battlefield.

The fix: Create one, reorganizing transportation units and equipping them with more data-linked trucks. The cost, Christianson said, will be $500 million a year -- for the next 20 years.


When the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines work side by side in the same region, as they did in Iraq, the combined supply system is a clashing mismatch of different cultures, incompatible communications systems, different stock numbers for similar items, even different vocabularies. Keeping track of a spare Marine Corps tank transmission as it moves from a Marine Corps depot to an Air Force cargo plane to an Army truck, for instance, "is one of our biggest challenges," Christianson said.

The fix: The U.S. Transportation Command, a multiservice agency, has been put in overall charge. The services and other agencies will have to adapt. "It's a cultural issue, not a technology issue," Christianson said.

The next hurdle is getting the Pentagon and Congress to invest more money than traditionally is spent on logistics.

"This isn't a terribly sexy business," Kern said. "It's hard to get people interested in it until you run out of something."

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Sempers,

Roger