Global Combat Support System: a Must for the Warfighting Commander Contractors in Contingency Operations: Panacea or Pain

Air Force Journal of Logistics, Fall, 2004 by Bryan T. Newkirk, Karen W. Currie

In today's environment, US forces have been called on to make numerous overseas deployments, many on short notice--using downsized Cold War legacy force and support structures--to meet a wide range of mission requirements associated with peacekeeping and humanitarian relief, while maintaining the capability to engage in major combat operations such as those associated with operations over Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan.

The dramatic increase in deployments from the continental United States, combined with the reduction of military resource levels, has increased the need for effective combat support. Because CS resources are heavy and constitute a large portion of the deployments, they have the potential to enable or constrain operational goals, particularly in today's environment, which is so dependent on rapid deployment. Central to solving the CS equation is streamlining CS deployment processes, leaning deployment packages, evaluating technologies that speed deployment, and the need for logistics management systems that keep pace with the evolving nature of war. Newkirk and Currie in "Global Combat Support System: A Must for the Warfighting Commander" argue for the need to link the network-centric warfare concept to logistics and for selection of a logistics management system that fully integrates requirements.

The history of contractor support for the US military can be traced to the Revolutionary War. Some level of contractor support has been a fact of life through all the major and minor conflicts of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, since the Vietnam conflict, contractors have been called on to perform work that directly supports military missions--work that increased their presence near or on the battlefield. This has led to significant issues--contractor status, service doctrine, contract versus organic capabilities, host-nation support contracts, and actual money and manpower savings. "In Contractors in Contingency Operations: Panacea or Pain?" Manker and Williams examine these issues and draw a variety of conclusions.

Based on lessons learned from military operations since Desert Storm and the asymmetric nature of future battlefields, DoD leaders have determined that a joint, network-centric warfare focus will guide the military's efforts to transform its forces.

Introduction

Providing the very best supply support to the joint warfighting commander requires that logisticians get the fight supplies and equipment, in the right quantities, in the right condition, at the right place, at the fight time. (1) Throughout the history of warfare, management systems that logisticians have used to provide the best supply support have changed and will continue to change. As a result of lessons learned from previous conflicts and continuous technological advances to improve warfighting capabilities in future wars, logisticians have been required to find new logistics management systems to keep pace with the evolving nature of war. Using logistics lessons learned from

Operations Iraqi Freedom and the Department of Defense's (DoD) specific guidance for departments and agencies to develop network-centric systems for use on tomorrow's information age battlefield, logisticians can develop a reasonable list of required capabilities for the new supply management system that will be used to support the joint warfighting commander in the future. However, the current dilemma within the DoD logistics community is not identifying requirements for this future system but selecting a supply management system that best meets the requirements.

The Network-Centric Warfare Concept Applied to Logistics

Based on lessons learned from military operations since Desert Storm and the asymmetric nature of future battlefields, DoD leaders have determined that a joint, network-centric warfare focus will guide the military's efforts to transform its forces. (2)

What is this network-centric warfare concept, and what does it look like when applied to logistics? Network-centric warfare effectively links or networks geographically dispersed semidependent joint forces operating in an unpredictable environment against a sophisticated adversary who uses asymmetric strategies. This network provides each joint force with real-time, common, actionable, battlespace information. The real-time actionable information enables each force to reorient based on shared information, make decisions based on common goals, and then act at rates previously unattainable. Unlike raw information that must be analyzed before a commander can use it, this actionable information is analyzed already and tells commanders actions to take to best support the warfighter. Ultimately, network-centric warfare greatly reduces decisionmaking and execution time lines, resulting in increased flexibility, lethality, and speed for the warfighter. (3)

Given DoD's emphasis on transforming the US military into a network-centric warfare fighting force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) has chartered the Office of Force Transformation (OFT) to take the lead with the transformation of the military. OFT has emphasized that network-centric operations incrementally integrated into the military will be coevolutionary. In other words, there must be a continuous development of mutually supporting strategies, concepts, processes, organizations, and technologies as the system is being fielded in DoD. Development will be based on feedback from the field and testing at designated experimentation sites. (4)