Logistics, Landpower, and Large-Scale Combat

I mean, because I think it gives listeners a sense of just how multifaceted your perspective on what really is a complicated subject, logistics, right? And, you know, to sort of frame it, um, look, from a, from a US Army perspective, and I do want to, as much as possible, root this discussion in land power and logistics-

No problem with that

... um, to the extent that we can do that.

Um, you know, institutionally, the US Army is our, our principal land power service, spent most of the first two decades of this century engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan, where logistics systems were exquisite.

They were complex certainly, but they weren't necessarily contested.

Um, we sort of took for granted the fact that-- When I was in Afghanistan, I was in a small compound with a team of six people, um, right sort of adjacent to a British base.

We were the only Americans in the area.

We still got all of our food.

We still got all of our ammunition.

We got everything that we needed.

Um, that's sort of a far cry from what we can expect on a future battlefield or what we're seeing, you know, from the lessons learned out of Ukraine-

Correct

... for example.

Logistics alongside things like air defense artillery are one of these things that for a long time felt like kind of tactical and operational backwaters-

Yes

... that now have become front and center the most sort of important thing.

And I was just telling our director, Colonel Pat Sullivan, a couple of weeks ago that, you know, I had been getting for about the last six months, uh, probably 50% of my submissions had something to do with AI.

That was the, the, the zeitgeist subject, right?

Yes.

The thing that everybody wanted to write about.

But increasingly, it's also been logistics and sustainment, because I think there's an appreciation of just how important this is and maybe how far we have to come to develop resilient, reliable logistics systems for a battlefield that's gonna look very different from what most of us kind of became accustomed to in those places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

So I think to start, we should really start big picture, and that's sort of defining what we're talking about when, when we say logistics.

Most of us have an intuitive sense of what that is.

We know that kind of on one end, you know, where, where supplies, ammunition, water, fuel, food, anything that a war fighter needs, when that gets to the end user, that's the end of logistics in that sense.

But where does it begin? Does it begin in a port or on an airfield? Does it begin in warehouses? Is it supply chains? How do you sort of conceptually bound this idea of logistics?