Q&A: Lieutenant General Kathleen M. Gainey

Written by Jeff McKaughan

 

Her prior commands include 5th Heavy Boat Company, Ford Island, Hawaii; 6th Transportation Battalion, Fort Eustis, Va.; 7th Corps Support Group, Bamberg, Germany; Defense Distribution Center, New Cumberland, Pa.; and commanding general, Surface Deployment and Distribution Command, Scott Air Force Base, Ill.

Gainey’s other assignments include chief, Container Freight Branch, Military Ocean Terminal Bay Area, MTMC Western Area, Oakland, Calif.; program analyst, United States Armament, Munitions and Chemical Command, Rock Island, Ill.; executive officer, 2nd Area Support Group, 22nd Support Command; S-2/S3, 702nd Transportation Battalion, Saudi Arabia; division transportation officer, 24th Infantry Division (Mech), Fort Stewart, Ga.; special assistant to the Chief of Staff, Army, Washington, D.C.; chief, Joint Operations Division, U.S. Transportation Command, Scott Air Force Base; director, Force Projection and Distribution, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, Washington, D.C.; deputy chief of staff, Resources and Sustainment, Multi-National Force-Iraq, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Her awards and decorations include the Distinguished Service Medal; Defense Superior Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster; Legion of Merit with Oak Leaf Cluster; Bronze Star Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster; Meritorious Service Medal with five Oak Leaf Clusters; Joint Service Commendation Medal; and Army Commendation Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters. Her badges include the Army Staff Identification Badge.

Lieutenant General Kathleen Gainey was interviewed by MLF Editor Jeff McKaughan.

Q: What are your roles and responsibilities as director for Logistics, J-4, the Joint Staff?

A: My primary role is that of an adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs for the entire spectrum of joint logistics, which includes maintenance, supply, transportation, medical, engineering and contingency contracting fields. I review cross-functional requirements and provide the chairman my best military advice and an awareness of the joint logistics environment. As the sponsor for the joint logistician and an integrator within the joint logistics community, I look at the joint logistics requirements of the combatant commanders and then provide support and input to the services, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, multinational community, other government agencies and key leaders. As the integrator for the community, I bring together all of the logistics “voices”—OSD, services, combatant commanders and our international and interagency partners—into a singularly focused enterprise. Finally, I work with OSD, services, functional combatant commanders and agencies to streamline defense logistics and improve interoperability and effectiveness. My unwavering intent is meeting the joint warfighter’s needs.

Q: What are your focus areas and goals for the coming months and year?

A: I recently released my 2009–2010 guidance to the Joint Staff, J-4 Directorate, and in that document I outlined the key areas we need to focus on. Here is what I told my staff: We need to support the chairman’s strategic priority to reset, reconstitute and revitalize the armed forces. This priority is key to a successful reduction in forces in Iraq while supporting operations in Afghanistan. We must continue to improve the support and care to our wounded, injured and ill servicemembers and their families. We have made significant progress in this area, but we can improve. We must improve inter- and intra-theater distribution management in both the southern route and what we call the northern distribution network— the areas surrounding Afghanistan. Again, we have made tremendous progress in establishing processes and agreements, but I believe there is more to do. Another area we need to focus on is to monitor and provide input to combatant command [COCOM] infrastructure development to support global presence, theater engagement plans and ongoing operations. I have the unique position to have visibility across the COCOM logistics directorates so my staff and I are well-suited to collaborate on these needs, and in many cases, coordinate solutions across the COCOMs.

Another priority is to provide strategic alignment and communication across the joint logistics environment. In order to accomplish this objective, we need to know the end state we envision in order to align our initiatives and the logistics community.

The end state of the joint logistics community is to provide integrated logistics capabilities to the joint force commander. Ultimately, this gives the joint force commander maximum flexibility to achieve a mission because he has the ability to plan an integrated joint logistics solution leveraging the best capability of each of the services. We aren’t there yet, but over the next two to three years, the J4 will focus on three initiatives in support of this effort. These initiatives were developed through extensive partnering with the services, combatant commands, OSD and agencies, and they will direct joint logistics toward an integrated future state.

Q: What are the first steps?

A: First, we will develop a common end-to-end defense supply chain framework and measurement system. This initiative addresses the processes, technologies, organizational cultures and decision authority structures that reinforce optimization of the supply chain.

In the current state, we optimize the supply chain segments. The problem is that we have seams that degrade overall logistics performance and the ability to get required resources to the right place at the right time, as measured at point of consumption. There is no owner or responsible entity for the end-to-end supply chain with commensurate decision-making authority that can impact fiscal and process changes that will ultimately optimize end-to-end performance from the warfighter’s perspective. We allow ourselves to be driven by what we can measure and what portion of the segment we control. This subcomponent mentality and independent authority structure has resulted in disagreement on the consensus definition of “start/source” and “end/point of consumption” of the end-to-end supply chain. We need to evaluate how well we “put the sock on the foot” of the forward deployed soldier from his or her perspective—not ours.

I lived this as the commander of the Defense Distribution Center. We were great at shipping customer demands quickly. Often, we shipped them well ahead of my metric goals. So my metrics at DDC looked great. However, we were not effective to the warfighter. The warfighter, in the hot, dusty desert in Operation Iraqi Freedom, had no ability to sort and store these items at the rate I was sending them—our doctrine had not caught up with our peacetime practices of delivering dedicated shipments to supply points at major installations. As a result, the supplies got to their destination late, or not at all. CENTCOM and DLA adapted and created an agile route plan to group units at central destinations and aggregated supplies into packages called “pure pallets” and changed both the business processes and our metrics; not just the individual steps. We need to have a holistic approach to the defense supply chain so that the entire process is optimized and we understand the second and third order impacts of every change both up and down the supply chain.

Second, we will recruit, develop and sustain logisticians that can effectively work in a joint interagency and multinational environment. When I was a captain, I never had to think about multinational or interagency partners. No longer! Now, our logistics officers work hand-in-glove with state department-led provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan and with our coalition partners throughout the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility. We have already made great strides in this effort and are now establishing the Center for Joint and Strategic Logistics at National Defense University. Joint logistics has been taught for years by our service schools, but there has never been a mechanism to standardize the training throughout DoD or take on broad education initiatives for joint and multinational logistics. I am very excited about the potential to make a real difference in the community with this effort, and to get us all speaking in the same language and for it to have the same meaning!

Third, we need to incorporate life cycle management as a key decision factor throughout acquisition and sustainment processes. This initiative addresses the significant sustainment cost to the services, given that weapons systems are often in service longer than the originally designed life cycle. During the design and early acquisition phase, cost trade-offs among mission performance, development time and life cycle sustainment are made.

Given that life cycle costs are deferred and not considered as part of the cost of acquisition, sustainment may be the cost that is traded off to facilitate approval of acquisition. In order to mitigate that shortcoming, this initiative takes a holistic approach to life cycle management from the earliest stages of acquisition through the sustainment processes across the services, industrial base and warfighter communities. Another key component to this initiative is our role in supporting and championing models used in developing key performance parameters. I think we can better support the services in this area and ultimately drive effectiveness with efficiency as a byproduct and not the starting point.

Q: And what about contractor support?

A: My final priority is to build upon the significant progress we have made in operational contract support. For short duration contingencies, we are dependent on existing weapons systems support contracts and other vehicles such as Navy contracts that support shipboard requirements in a specific geographic region. As operations grow in scope and duration, the need for contractors increases significantly as the demand for commercial air and surface transportation airlift, communications, life support and other support capabilities either exceeds organic capacity or a commercial contract is a more effective solution. We are almost totally dependent on contract support in operations requiring reconstruction.

Several trends have led to a dependency on contractors. In the early to mid-1990s, budgetary pressures and force size restrictions led DoD to reduce the number of military and DoD civilian employees—particularly those performing operational support— and outsource many of these functions. As a result, organic capacity no longer exists in many instances. Additionally, our current weapons systems have increased in technical complexity, and we chose to purchase readiness agreements, which put the burden for supplies and maintenance on the original equipment manufacturer. This is not a bad thing as long as they deliver and the contract was written correctly.

We are deeply involved in developing guidance and planning procedures for operational contract support. We are partnered with the assistant deputy under secretary of defense for program support and are utilizing a collaborative approach with the military departments, OSD staff, the Joint Staff, and combat support agencies. Three years ago, we had no joint policy and limited doctrinal guidance for management and oversight of contracted support and contractors on the battlefield. Working together, OSD, the services and the Joint Staff have identified initial capability gaps and have assembled a community of practice to close shortfalls. To date, we are updating key policies, developing relevant operational contract support doctrine, providing geographic combatant commands and the Joint Forces Command with joint operational contract support planners and deploying synchronized predeployment and tracker systems to attain visibility and accountability of contractor personnel in contingency operations.

While operational contract support has proved to be a significant force multiplier, it can be a tremendous challenge during major operations and requires significant preplanning management early in the operational planning process. We have a lot of work still to accomplish, especially in the area of integrating operational contract support into joint operational planning scenarios.

Q: How is the joint logistics environment changing, and how will it affect future combat operations?

A: We used to say that combat service support forces [logistics, medical, personnel] and non-combatants, such as contractors and DoD civilians, would not be exposed to combat—they would operate in the rear. In today’s operational environment, there is no rear area—the battlefield is nonlinear and noncontiguous. Our enemy knows no bounds; he will target soft areas and lines of communication. At one time, we could study the enemy. He was predictable and easily identifiable, but that is no longer possible. Now, with irregular warfare more prominent, we have had to adjust how we fight and how we support the warfighter. We are in a protracted war, where persistent conflict is becoming the “new normal.”

A second key area it is changing is in our need to be able to work with our international partners and nongovernmental agencies. This current conflict has convinced me more than ever that we need to go beyond joint. Our new horizons must be set on our ability to seamlessly interact with our interagency and international partners. This is how we will fight in the future, and now is the time to flesh out the issues with interoperability roles and missions. Just ask yourself who you see on the battlefield today in most of the contingencies. It’s UN, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, other nations, etc.

Logistics planning must account for this more than ever as these partners will be intertwined in day-to-day operations—not just on some distant part of the battlefield. We will experience competing requirements for the same contractors, slot times on airfields, and space on lines of communication. How we adjudicate these conflicts while not impacting operations of the overall campaign—not just the U.S. military segment—will be a critical factor in our overall success.

Q: What are your big challenges facing multinational logistics planning in the future?

A: We currently have a remarkable opportunity to shape the future of joint logistics as we have several important documents being rewritten that will shape and inform joint logistics for the next generation. There are three components that are creating this unique opportunity: the national security documents that change with the administration; the defense documents that are in rewrite; and in the Joint Staff J4, we are writing the new Joint Logistics White Paper and the supply joint integrating concept.

One of my top priorities on the Joint Staff is to promote and enhance multinational logistics. We have come a long way in establishing partnerships and formal agreements that have raised coalition support to its highest level ever, though we still have a long way to go. For the multinational logistics community to effectively support our global security objectives in the future, we must consider what the challenges will look like in 40 years. I believe we are seeing a glimpse of what this logistics support will require. As the war fighting landscape continues to evolve from a Cold War-type buildup to a three-block-war engagement, the need to factor in our interagencies, nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations, and commercial partners is essential. In my view, this will become our greatest challenge in the next generation of multinational logistics.

How do we integrate these disparate organizations into an effective and agile network of support that can handle a firefight, rebuild roads and improve the local economy at the same time? We must develop a structure to integrate beyond the Department of Defense logistics community and capitalize on the competencies that other agencies and nations offer. The focus must be on developing a comprehensive plan that leverages the strengths of each agency to fully expand the solution set. When you have reconciliation, it will lead to stability, which leads to development and prosperity. So all of these partners play a role in each phase. Our strategic campaign plan must fully encompass the roles and responsibilities of each.

I am confident that we are thinking of this challenge at the right levels of our government and within our multinational partners. We must address this issue now in order to establish the rules, procedures and agreements in order to lay the framework for the next generation.

Q: Any final thoughts?

A: Developing a common core joint logistics curriculum and career development process across the services is essential in ensuring a well-trained joint logistics force in the future. The Center for Joint and Strategic Logistics Excellence at National Defense University, under the leadership of Dr. Paul Needham, the acting executive director, is a step in the right direction. We have assembled a working group to develop the attributes of a qualified joint logistician and have started to put the pieces together for a curriculum that will be robust, comprehensive and seamless across the various service and joint schools that teach joint logistics. I am pleased with the partnership we have developed with industry, academia and DoD logistics leaders.

But we have a long way to go. We owe it to the next generation of joint logisticians to establish the processes and institutions to properly educate and train our officers to address joint concepts using a common joint language.

We are in the midst of a critical period in joint logistics, and we must collectively continue to focus on providing the joint force commander freedom of action. ♦

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