Compass Points - Logistics Paper Tiger
Award winning essay sounds alarm
Compass Points - Logistics Paper Tiger
Award winning essay sounds alarm
October 24, 2024
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What is the key to deterring and defeating China, particularly in the Pacific? Is the key a new missile, a new ship, a new plane? Perhaps the key is something sometimes considered more mundane, logistics.
While a student at the National War College, Lieutenant Colonel Zachary S. Hughes, USAF, wrote his essay, "Giving Our “Paper Tiger” Real Teeth - Fixing the U.S. Military’s Plans for Contested Logistics Against China." It won the 2024 Secretary of Defense National Security Essay Competition.
In his essay LtCol Hughes warns,
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. . . the U.S. military faces the greatest logistical challenge of its history, in a conflict where logistics is likely to be determinative, and while wielding new operating concepts that thought of logistics too little or too late.
-- LtCol Hughes
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LtCol Hughes reviews historical examples of the importance of logistics for military operations including Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the German offensive of 1918, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and the British in Burma in World War II. From there, the author goes on to warn that today, the Army, Navy and Marines have all created new plans to counter China along the first island chain. Each of the service plans, however, are logistically insufficient individually and when multiplied together are geometrically insufficient.
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The Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations.
Former Marine Commandant General David Berger laid out a bold vision for reform in Force Design 2030, resulting in the divestment of legacy systems including armor, artillery, and infantry.52 Force Design 2030 aims to reorient the Corps toward supporting a campaign of naval maneuver, projecting power from the littorals by denying maneuver to an adversary while creating options for friendly naval maneuver.53 Fundamental to this effort are two related concepts. First, expeditionary advanced base operations (EABO) establish littoral bases that provide fires, sensing, or logistical support to the maritime component.54 Second, the stand-in force is envisioned as a low-signature littoral force that can survive, maneuver, and generate effects within an adversary’s weapons engagement zone.55
To sustain a network of dispersed operations in a littoral environment against a lethal adversary, the Marines have updated their logistics doctrine.56 The Corps clearly recognizes the need to be lighter and more mobile and able to operate coherently despite strict signature management.57 These updates bring more questions than answers, however, and not all the answers may be favorable to EABO. Three major flaws in logistics still plague the Marines’ new concepts.
First, the concepts themselves were developed by officers from an operational and maneuver background with undue consideration for logistics, a fact later acknowledged by General Berger.58 Marine observers have quietly begun to acknowledge that the operational concepts may themselves be logistically infeasible.59
Second, of all the Services, the Marines have chosen the most logistically challenging concept (that is, closest to the threat and farthest from friendly supply) despite owning the fewest organic logistic assets.60 By design, the Marines are reliant on joint force logistics for sustained campaigns, lacking the intratheater logistics of other Services.61 Though expert at expeditionary tactical logistics, the Marines have identified a shortfall in understanding operational logistics—in other words, inherently joint, theater-scale logistics.62
The Marines have thus assessed that their new concepts require greater leveraging of joint logistics, yet this reveals a third problem: The solutions to EABO’s logistics challenges could obviate the need for EABO altogether. If substantial tactical airlift is one solution, why not simply generate fires and effects from airpower instead of a littoral base?63
If low-signature, high-speed watercraft are needed to sustain stand-in forces, why not simply employ fires and effects from the watercraft?64 Littoral fires and effects would doubtless challenge a Chinese adversary, yet if deploying them at meaningful scale requires joint logistics support that consequently constrains the joint force’s other options, then EABO may be more trouble than it is worth.
As it is, the sustainability of the concept is in question despite the Marines planning for a mere three Marine littoral regiments—begging a question of utility.65 If unresolved, these problems could echo the situation of the Japanese on Guadalcanal in 1942. The isolated Japanese lodgment was intended to improve Japan’s operational air and naval reach, yet it proved so costly for the Imperial Japanese Navy to support that it ultimately did more harm than good.66
-- Giving Our “Paper Tiger” Real Teeth, JFQ 115, 4th Quarter 2024
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What is the key to deterring and defeating China, particularly in the Pacific? Is the key a new missile, a new ship, a new plane? LtCol Hughes persuasively argues the real key is something sometimes considered more mundane, logistics. LtCol Hughes has made an authoritative review of the importance of military logistics both in the past and in the future.
LtCol Hughes is not a Marine. He has no interest in being either for or against the Marine Corps' controversial Force Design. His essay is simply a sharp-eyed warning that the military services first island chain plans are incomplete at best and dangerous at worst. In particular, the Marine Corps' first island chain plan is likely unsupportable, duplicative, and unnecessary.
Compass Points salutes LtCol Zachary S. Hughes for his award-winning logistics essay. LtCol Hughes sounded the alarm. It is time for Congress to send the military services and particularly the Marine Corps back to the drawing board. China is a danger to the US, but it is not the only danger. The Nation does not need and cannot afford a defensive missile Marine Corps on Pacific islands. When trouble erupts on some foreign shore, the Nation needs crisis response. The Nation needs a Marine Corps that is an updated, enhanced, and expandable global 9-1-1 force.
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JFQ 115, 4th Quarter 2024
Giving Our “Paper Tiger” Real Teeth
Fixing the U.S. Military’s Plans for Contested Logistics Against China
By Zachary S. Hughes, National War College
https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/joint-force-quarterly/vol115/iss3/20/
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Compass Points – Narco Boat Hits Oki
Autonomous supply vessel
October 18, 2024
https://marinecorpscompasspoints.substack.com/p/compass-points-narco-boat-hits-oki
As the official spokesperson for Force Design (2030), I would like to assert that LtCol Hughes is entirely in error. His key mistake has been to ignore our key briefing slides in which we have clearly stated that the EABO solution is a) classified, b) in development, c) to be sourced from a sister service. This has been stated many times and was verified in the Force Design Development wargaming. Further, various other wargames and products, in which 'god mode' logistics have been enabled, also verified the logistic component of EABO as part of Force Design. I will amend and say that we are also leveraging Talent Management 2030 to further support a), b), and / or c). As always, best wishes and "Verba non acta".
I can detect a bit of frustration here among the comments and I think it is justified. The FD2030 debate has been going on since 2019 aimed at two Marine Commandants (one former and the current). The current Commandant by plunging ahead with the former’s “experiment” and not acknowledging the mistakes and short comings of FD2030 is frustrating. FD2030 attempts to sell us on a war that will be fought defensively in the “WEZ” on small Pacific islands that grants the false superiority to A2/AD missiles. What FD2030 misses is the flexibility, adaptability and strategic mobility of the US Marine Corps that can fight a global war in every “clime and place”.
The rise of the CCP, as a competing global power, presents the need of a new National Security and Military Strategy. The myopic “island chain” strategy is a ‘Containment Strategy” left over from the 1950s Cold War and is a political vs a military strategy. The global “great power competition” that now confronts the US needs a deterrence strategy. If that strategy fails we will need a global military strategy and war plan that brings China to the negotiation table. For that reason the US needs a global war plan similar to the Pre-WW2 Rainbow Plans.
In 1924 the US started planning for a global war with a set of “Rainbow” Plans assigning colors to potential adversary countries; war against Germany was Plan Black and Japan was Plan Orange. Interestingly, Plan Orange was initiated despite the fact that relations with Japan were friendly at the time. The US Navy empowered the Naval War College to play a pivotal role in the War Plan Orange. The “Navy painted Orange Plans on a canvass of heroic size” (p.14) because it focused on the Pacific and the SLOCs. The idea was to block the SLOCs and starve Japan to the negotiation table. The goal of complete surrender did not develop until the war was well under way and was a political decision.
The CCP continues to spread its influence globally with its BRI particularly focused on SLOC choke points. For example, the CCP now has a military base in the Horn of Africa; it is contributing to infrastructure projects (including ports, highways and railroads) in Myanmar and Pakistan) negating their Malacca Strat Problem. The CCP recognizes that it must keep its SLOCs open in order to feed its population and keep its people employed. For that reason a war with the CCP will be a global war. The US, both political and military planners, need to get all its junk into one sea bag and focused on the global war problem and most certainly its logistics. S/F
https://www.amazon.com/War-Plan-Orange-Strategy-1897-1945/dp/1591145007/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2GED7HB8B7K6V&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KofUVSu8krRKNJAkq2rHwf1dvhba4he-lRGbKTKMbzzf_QCnAPFOsiprAz00NT0xDRQHPyEB8B-ftNDGZaOcWnPIh4jV8Jc9s01NFDFpGwvEWDSdcaIKTHtNgonoWT54.Ck530c8mWAsyDm4cSBEl2ze5tgBPc6d7pi6yk5fs8Oc&dib_tag=se&keywords=War+Plan+Orange&qid=1729868273&s=books&sprefix=war+plan+orange%2Cstripbooks%2C190&sr=1-1
BTW when it comes to frustration I hear ya brothers.