The supply chain lesson of the "Iron Hills"
James Aaron Cooke, Contributing Editor -- Logistics Management, 2/1/2006
History buffs like to read accounts of old military campaigns to glean the lessons of war for future insight. In this age of instant communication, then, it should come as no surprise that the U.S. Army has already written an examination of the war in Iraq. What's especially interesting to readers of this magazine is that the Army took a warts-and-all, close-up look at its logistics operation during the recent invasion of that country.
The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL), a military think tank at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., has written a report called "On Point." This account and analysis of the Iraqi War can only be read online at CALL's website: http://call.army.mil.
Supply chain professionals might want to read Chapter 7, which discusses rather candidly the difficulties encountered by the military during the assault on Baghdad. According to the authors, the army faced a host of logistics-related problems. During the war, stocks of food barely kept up with frontline demand. The logistics system was "incapable of providing sufficient Meals Ready To Eat (MREs) for soldiers fighting Iraqi forces," the report states.
U.S. forces found themselves so strapped for petroleum products that they resorted to foraging for lubricants and draining oil from non-mission equipment. Short of explosives, the forces had to use supplies captured from enemy troops. The Army also had trouble getting adequate supplies of bottled water to troops fighting in a desert.
It wasn't that the U.S. military hadn't developed a plan for rapid replenishment of critical supplies. The report notes that after Operation Desert Storm, the military had tried to upgrade logistics capabilities by establishing new distribution practices, installing in-transit visibility tools, and upgrading to an automated information system. The objective was to reduce huge stockpiles of inventory—the so-called "iron mountains" of supplies that were pre-positioned in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. This time, the U.S. military wanted a quick-response supply chain to move supplies from the United States and Germany into the battlefield.
Unfortunately, that strategy did not always work as planned during the complex, fast-paced military campaign. "On Point" spells out a number of reasons why. For instance, inadequate communications and the chaos of the battlefield thwarted the military from moving field requests for supplies through the system. Moreover, visibility technology did not work as envisioned because the Army didn't have an accurate picture of supplies at transload points. The report concludes that the visibility systems available after the first Gulf War were not yet mature enough for the task now at hand. Finally, the authors criticized the current command setup for failing to place a single person or unit in charge of delivery of "all things large and small."
Despite those shortcomings, the U.S. Army did manage to move food, fuel, and ammunition along an 8,000-mile-long supply chain. And even if the replenishment operations weren't right on target for all the materials needed, the Army did avoid a huge buildup of inventory. As one logistician noted, there were still some "iron hills" but no "iron mountains."
What strikes me as most interesting about this report is its candor. Clearly the Army plans to make corrections in its logistics operation in the event of another military campaign. And that's the critical lesson supply chain managers can learn from the Army's experience: You have to be honest about your shortcomings in order to fix them.
Comments? E-mail me at LM@reedbusiness.com
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