Supporting Gulf War 2.0

Army, Sep 2003 by Pellegrini, Frank N

The 377th Theater Support Command provides the stuff of war in Iraq faster, cheaper and better.

When Maj. Gen. David E. Kratzer was chosen back in January to take his 377th Theater Support Command (TSC) in Kuwait to lead the support operation for a war in Iraq, one of the first things he did was read Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War, which is the theater support memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. Pagonis, the commander of the first TSC-a man who knew what it was to build what Kratzer has likened to a "city in the sand."

To launch and sustain a massive invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 377th would command specialists in food, power and water; military police; fire and medical services; transportation; air and seaport operations; personnel; finance; and all the record-keeping and accountability inherent in those services. Its domestic downtrace of a handful of units swelled to eight general-officer commands, 13 colonel-level commands and nearly 30,000 soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen. Members of the command also supervised countless civilian contractors, both American and Kuwaiti. In effect, the 377th ran all the manpower, facilities and transportation necessary to support a major ground war-and all for the highest stakes imaginable.

"We are here for one reason only," Kratzer would recount later. "To take care of that soldier who is in that foxhole. If you keep that goal in mind then everything else fits into place."

Moving Mountains is not at heart a war story-bookstores carry it in the management section, and likewise Kratzer's task was more about managing inventory than infantry. The concept of the TSC had been conceived to support the U.S. military's first major war since Vietnam, and with it Pagonis had brought military logistics to the brink of the 20th century. But the intervening 12 years of information management advances since then have changed the world all over again.

So as Secretary Rumsfeld, Gen. Franks and ground forces commander Lt. Gen. David McKiernan were seeking to transform the military's warfighting style and wage a leaner, meaner, better coordinated Gulf War II, Kratzer wanted to update Pagonis' 20th century mountain-moving with the just-in-time concepts and technologies of the 21st century.

"Twelve years ago, this thing called the 'support command' was really an ad hoc organization that the Army felt it had to create in order to provide the needed support structure," Kratzer said. "It's been a very interesting comparison as we've seen the advantages that we have today through technology, and also the lessons learned, now that we've had the opportunity to read that book and look at what had taken place before."

What had taken place before wasn't always pretty. Containers in the tens of thousands stacked up in the Saudi Arabian ports, waiting to be picked up and moved on. Warfighting soldiers like the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) lined up, waiting idle (and a tempting target for the enemy) while support troops cracked the containers open, one by one, to find out what was inside, who needed it and where it had to go. Hard words were used in describing some of the situations-inefficiencies, wasted manpower and the dirtiest word in the logistician's dictionary-backlog.

Enter Brig. Gen. Jack Stultz, commanding general of the 143rd Transportation Command. Like Kratzer, he was an Army reservist-and a logistical manager for consumer products' supplier Procter & Gamble in his civilian life. The 377th had established prepositioned stocks of supplies in warehouses on U.S. bases in Kuwait, but the rest had to come off ships at the docks of Shuaiba Port in Kuwait and the Kuwait Naval Base. Meanwhile, the flow of troops coming in through the Kuwait International Airport had to be managed so that neither they nor their equipment ever spent time sitting around. Kratzer knew that air and seaport operations-getting the soldiers and their equipment and ammunition into the theater at the same time and getting both quickly on to where they were needed-was going to make or break the operation. He selected Stultz to be his deputy commander.

Stultz would run prewar operations with the same efficiency that he employed at Proctor & Gamble. Part of what made things run better was sheer transportation muscle. New crane-equipped, large medium speed roll-on/roll-off ships, in concert with smaller landing craft utility boats staffed by Army reservists from Florida and North Carolina, could download 1,500 to 2,000 pieces of equipment from sea to shore in less than 48 hours. Heavy equipment transporters, in short supply during Pagonis' day, could speed tanks, ammunition and equipment up Kuwaiti highways to where they were needed most. Those two items alone, Stultz estimated, improved his operation's efficiency by 50 percent over what had been achieved in the first Gulf War.

The rest was using the technology that had become commonplace in the private sector. At the Shuaiba Port in Kuwait, units like the Army Reserve's 1184th Transportation Terminal Battalion used radio frequency identification tags and scanners to inventory what was in a container, who it belonged to, and where it needed to go.