Up Front to the Warfighter
Written by Peter A. Buxbaum
In short, supplying warfighters in Afghanistan presents challenges not encountered in Iraq. Of course, the U.S. military and the contractors upon which it relies are not starting from scratch: the United States has been present in Afghanistan since 2002.
Furthermore, some of the basic logistics organizations that serve Iraq also supply warfighters in Afghanistan and will continue to do so. But the ramp-up of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, combined with a more robust presence in the south of that country where U.S. forces have been sparse until now, will test the agility of the U.S. military’s logistics capabilities and those of its contractors. “Like all big defense contactors, we were focused on Iraq and had only a small footprint in Afghanistan,” said Bruce Harrison, vice president for customer support and field solutions at BAE Systems Inc. “We will use that and grow as our customers require.” BAE’s involvement with military logistics activities primarily revolves around supporting the vehicles and weapons systems— including versions of the MRAP and FMTV tactical vehicle, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the Paladin self-propelled howitzer, and the Harrier jet—which it supplies the U.S. military.
Afghanistan’s austere environment has challenged BAE to find the right level of support to provide its military customers. “The Afghanistan environment is such that if you put in too many support personnel, the logistics tail gets too large, and it causes problems for combatant commanders,” Harrison said. “They have to protect, feed and shelter these guys.” BAE copes with this situation by cross-training some of its platform support specialists in other areas. “That way one field service rep can service multiple platforms,” Harrison noted.
The U.S. Central Command already has structures in place to coordinate the necessary increases in supplies that will be required for the additional 17,000 ground troops headed to Afghanistan. “CENTCOM has a joint planning team for the Operation Enduring Freedom plus-up,” noted Lieutenant Colonel Craig Gaddis, deputy director of logistics at U.S. Air Forces Central (AFCENT), which coordinates aviation for CENTCOM.
The joint planning team is where CENTCOM planners meet face to face with their counterparts from other military components. “If there is a requirement identified through the joint planning effort that cannot be met by the services, CENTCOM will see who else in theater has the inventory to solve the shortfall,” Gaddis related.
Two entities headquartered in Kuwait—CDDOC, the U.S. Central Command’s Deployment Distribution Operations Center and DDKS, the Defense Logistics Agency’s Defense Distribution Depot Kuwait, Southwest Asia—also come into play when it comes to supplying warfighters headed for Afghanistan. Since both organizations already stock inventory for and supply warfighters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they are able to shift materiel from one area of operation to another as needed.
“Kuwait has plenty of commercial and military airlift that can easily fly materiel into Bagram instead of Baghdad,” said Rear Admiral Mark Heinrich, DLA’s director of logistics operations and readiness.
But airlift is the most expensive of the modes of transportation available to the military logisticians based in Kuwait. Most materiel moving from Kuwait to Afghanistan is shipped by sea to Karachi, Pakistan, from which it proceeds over the road by truck to the Afghan border and beyond. DLA teams are embedded with deployable units such as brigade combat teams and aviation brigades in Afghanistan and therefore have a pretty good sense of what they need, Heinrich said. “These war fighting support representatives have received training on how to listen to warfighter requirements, how to order materiel from DLA, and how to pre-position materiel,” he added.
Much of the materiel that is or will be moving to Afghanistan is already prepositioned at DDKS, according to Heinrich. “As the Marine Corps and the Army have identified materiel to be supplied, we have worked with CDDOC to schedule the movement of the materiel to Afghanistan,” he said. DDKS is owned and operated by Agility Logistics on behalf of DLA.
From DLA’s perspective, materiel moving to Iraq and Afghanistan is largely similar, but with a greater emphasis on cold weather gear heading for the Afghan theater, according to Heinrich. But actually getting the materiel to Afghanistan involves a “huge shift in supply lines,” said George Allen, vice president for business development at Agility Defense & Government Services. “Some transportation contracts that operate in Iraq and Kuwait have been used to assist in the shift.”
Heavy lift contracts with the global ocean carriers Maersk and APL have facilitated the shift of large numbers of MRAP vehicles, the heavy lumbering trucks that protect U.S. troops from roadside attacks, from Iraq and Kuwait to Afghanistan. The services provided by the ocean carriers land the MRAPs at Karachi, after which they are trucked through Pakistan to Afghanistan. The northern ground transportation route originates in Europe and trucks materiel through Turkey and the central Asian former Soviet republics. Much of the cargo traversing the northern route originates at a DLA depot in Germany.
The northern route came into play, noted Allen, because the southern route, which takes cargo through Pakistan “is so fraught with problems. There are 22 different routes we can use to move cargo to Afghanistan if need be.” The northern route is also more advantageous for Agility because it can rely to a greater extent on its own organic assets, as opposed to those of subcontractors, to move the cargo.
DLA has yet to establish a distribution depot in Afghanistan, but did issue a request for information in December 2008 for a contractor-owned and -operated distribution center—much like DDKS—in Kandahar. The idea behind that installation, according to Allen, who said Agility submitted a white paper to DLA on the establishment of a distribution depot in Afghanistan, would be to allow the staging of sufficient quantities of materiel locally to hedge against delays in the trucking operations through Pakistan and the central Asian “stans,” which are subject to a myriad of dangers, including terrorist attack.
From AFCENT’s perspective, the main challenge of moving into Afghanistan is its sparse infrastructure, especially in the southern part of the country where the Air Force has not been as heavily committed to date. “Because Afghanistan is a landlocked country, we will have to increasingly rely on airlift,” said Gaddis.
The increased use of airlift is going to raise logistics costs in Afghanistan. “The most cost-effective means of moving bulk cargo is over the road,” said Gaddis, “and we do emphasize that as a first choice. When time constraints do not allow for ground transportation, we go to airlift.” But the infrastructure in Afghanistan also limits the use of air transport. “In Afghanistan, you are limited by the number of aircraft that can cycle through in any given 24-hour period,” said Gaddis.
AFCENT has been busy establishing new aerial ports, installations responsible for the management and movement of cargo, in country, together with a network of airfields, landing strips, and forward operating bases. The additional personnel assigned to southern Afghanistan must also be housed and sustained, and this has required the shipment of large volumes of construction materiel, as well as equipment for power, water and food operations, into Afghanistan.
“Next we will see the flow of personnel going in there,” said Gaddis, “and this will require another level of support. We are currently studying what the appropriate level of sustainment will be for the additional soldiers and Marines.”
BAE Systems’ Bruce Harrison has noticed that there has been a shift in requirements in Afghanistan from the MRAP to lighter and smaller tactical vehicles, which are considered better suited to Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. “Fortunately we have facilities in Afghanistan already,” he said. “We will be able to piggyback on those and add to them.”
BAE provides support to the platforms it provides the U.S. military in the form of new equipment training and the provision of repair parts. “We provide these services right down to the company level,” said Harrison. “In order to facilitate that service, we have employed a strategy of embedding our service people with units they are very familiar with. They feel like they are part of those units, they mobilize with them, and they help train the unit mechanics on the other side. We intend to continue to use that strategy.”
At a higher level, BAE employs experts who analyze readiness trends and discern the kinds of equipment required for a deployment early on in the process. “We help military components in assessing the readiness picture and applying it before they hit critical mass,” said Harrison.
BAE also enjoys strategic relationships with agencies like the DLA, the Army Materiel Command, the managers of the various programs it works with. “But we also have relationships right down to the deploying units,” said Harrison. “We are in contact with the G-4s of divisions and brigades deploying to theater as well as sustainment brigade commanders and staffs.”
DLA utilizes a series of metrics by which it measures its own and its contractors’ logistics performance. “First and foremost, we measure how long it takes to get materiel to the customer,” said Heinrich. “The benchmark at CDDOC was seven days from the depot into the hands of the customer. That interval is much shorter now, averaging two and a half days.”
This improvement has come, according to Heinrich, from better visibility DLA maintains on its shipments. “Pallets are visible much earlier in the process, and this allows for last-minute changes,” said Heinrich. “It allows air carriers to pick up shipments right from the DDKS loading dock.”
DLA also measures its level of backorders. “We keep our unfilled orders for CENTCOM very low,” said Heinrich. “For example, on average the Army has 600 helicopters deployed to CENTCOM at any one time, but fewer than 10 helicopters are waiting for a needed DLA part at any given time.”
DLA rates its suppliers with a metric that tracks how fast they get repair parts to customers. BAE has achieved scores of nearly 100 percent for that performance over the last two years, according to Harrison. DLA also has a desired goal of 90 percent for the timely supply of equipment. BAE’s performance for the positioning of MRAPs and other tactical vehicles has stood at “95 percent or better for some time now,” he added.
Military units use a measurement referred to as operational readiness to rate how much of its equipment is fully mission-capable. Equipment not mission-capable is categorized by the reason for this shortfall, such as lack of parts or maintenance time. “We track those readiness rates from the equipment owning units, and that is the metric we use to measure our own success,” said Harrison.
BAE accomplishes the real-time tracking of operational readiness at a readiness operations center where BAE representatives have access via computer to the readiness report cards issued by the operational units. “We keep watch for any negative trend and try to turn that around early on in the process,” said Harrison.
DLA uses a home-grown planning tool to measure the supply requirements for the additional ground troops that will be moving into Afghanistan. “We use those requirements to plan acquisitions,” said Heinrich. “With adequate lead time we are able to get the required materiel into the pipeline.”
Shipment visibility and efficiency is enhanced by the CENTCOM mandate of the use of in-transit visibility tags on all shipments. “That means that all ocean containers and every aircraft pallet are RFID [radio frequency identification]-tagged,” said Gaddis.
In-transit visibility allows for the monitoring of assets as they move through the transportation system. The RFID tags are read and data is recorded into the system as shipments depart from their points of origin and as they arrive in theater.
“The technology has aided in the overall management, planning, sequencing and prioritization of shipments,” said Gaddis. “If there is a conflict in priorities, we are able to resolve it and provide prioritization of assets across the services and re-sequencing of airlift.” Technologies aside, the key to the smooth and efficient deployment of assets to theater, for Heinrich, involves “a good old-fashioned planning effort,” he said. “Availability of data allows teams working on consumable items or energy and fuels to plan how much is needed in the field and to position those products to supply warfighters on time.” The DLA is currently working on setting up similar planning teams for other commodities such as food and lumber.
“The most important thing is to share demand data,” Heinrich added. “This allows the services to collaborate on their anticipated requirements and provide us the information that we need to get what they need—when and where they need it.” ♦