The vice director of logistics on the US Joint Staff discusses the impact of stagnant budgets, the best use of contractors, especially near or in the battlespace, outflanking challenges such as area-denial strategies, and protecting the cyber information chain.
With budgets stagnant, keeping track of gear is even more important. Going forward, how do you make sure pieces don't go missing or are mishandled?
I think the combination of reduced budgets, reduced up-tempo in terms of forward deployment, reduced procurement you are going to see a big increase in those basic blocking and tackling accountability. If you look through the sweep of history here you find that when money is flowing free and equipment is coming in, we tend to put less emphasis on detailed accountability and the rest. Without a doubt we built what I, as a logistician, would call some bad habits. We did it for good reasons. We bought MRAPs, we didn’t have time to think through a 30-year acquisition plan. We needed to get them onto the battlespace and they saved a lot of lives.
So now we are thinking through the rest of the 30-year lifecycle for these things. What is the most effective and efficient way to sustain it? How are we really accounting for those things? We are beginning to build that back into our system, accountability of our gear. We have had a lot of stuff that has flown through the system, and accountability of it wasn't done to the degree that we will now do. As a Marine this is something that is near and dear to my heart. We are pretty renowned for making sure that we wring every bit that we can out of a piece of gear. But that doesn't just happen by saying it. It happens by holding folks accountable and getting down and making sure we do good accountability.
How do you drive that idea into the workforce, though?
Commanders will now emphasize this. We have got to champion that. We have got to champion the effort to say, "Hey, we are not in an era of plenty right now. We are no longer buying things before we are using them up. We are now going to be holding them for longer." So as we do our logistics estimate for the chairman, we are placing a premium on assessing the maintenance readiness of the equipment that is out there today. And we are assessing it to a greater degree.
The Pentagon is focused on countering A2/AD challenges in the future. How does that play for logistics, whether with new technologies or concepts of operation?
As a Marine I look to sea basing as a great example on a technological way of skirting anti-access/area-denial, where I have the opportunity to maneuver well outside or at the fringes of that threat ring and do my logistics from there, as opposed to having to have a set base inside a threat ring or something that may come inside a threat ring that isn't mobile. That is a great technological advantage that logistically allows us to counter A2AD. And so that is one example out there. Establishing a robust global network out there and it doesn't necessarily have to just be a uniform network, it doesn't just have to be military bases out there. Anti-access can also mean access to commercial markets that we need. So we need to make sure that we have enough organic and redundant capability out there. By having access to both a robust commercial network, as well as a robust organic network, it gives me flexibility and opportunities.
Sounds like how you use commercial partners could change in the future as part of that plan.
We have used contractors since the country has been started, but what we have tended not to do is figure out how to really integrate them into our operations. It has always been "yea, we got those commercial guys out there too."
One of the things that we are working specifically in the J4 is something called Operational Contract Support. One of the things that we are doing is saying you will have commercial entities in the battlespace with you out there. And it is more than just writing the contract the right way. It's thinking through, am I bringing the right people in? Am I bringing in 15 different contractors? Is that Army unit in the next area contracting with a guy who I am trying to contract with and we are driving the price up? Is the State Department there bringing capabilities to bear?
And then, it is also managing all of those folks on the battlespace to make sure that not only are we getting what we are paid for, but that we are effectively managing them. Did we bring too many contractors in? Who is protecting them? How are they being accounted for? Are they not going around doing something we don't want them to do? You got to think through all the aspects of what you are doing as you do it, write the good contract and then manage it well. Not just in getting what you paid for it but in the whole aspect of how commercial entities can impact your operations out there.
A2/AD concerns extend into the cyber realm as well. Does that impact your end of the war-fighting business?
One of the things that we had in these last couple of fights is clarity of information. We were able to use our information technology pretty freely to understand to a great degree of detail what was required in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We may not enjoy that same capability next time. Just about every war-fighting domain talks about the need to pay attention to cyber, but in the logistics war-fighting domain we got a particular problem because of this dependency that we have on commercial entities out there, as well as our supply chains, our transportation chains, our distribution chains — we can't wall them off into a military-only network out there. We are dependent upon commercial entities and dependent upon other partners out there. We are depending on them not just for things but also for their information. And they are dependent upon us for their information. I think that is going to be a big change for the next fight out there.
Are you working out how to protect your commercial partners from those kind of attacks?
It is a big piece of what gets talked about in a lot of the forums we work with industry as well as within our own internal cyber efforts. You talked about matching up commercial entities with government entities, and there are a lot of folks paying attention to this. And that works really well if you are one of the big defense contractors and you got hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to throw at an effort out there to protect your cyber networks. But when you look at the breadth of logistics that we have out there, we are not dependent just on the big defense contractors. We are also dependent on a lot of the small businesses out there. And we are dependent again not just for their things but for their information. They have got to get the information from us in order to know what to pass back up.
The big defense contractors have got the resources to protect their networks, but their subcontractors, particularly when you get down into it, they don't have the resources or the expertise to really understand how to protect their networks and their domain, yet they are passing information, they are generating information and passing it up into these bigger networks. They create a vulnerability for us. It is not just in attacking the network necessarily, but you also got to think in terms of, is the information correct, has somehow their information been changed and are we getting the wrong picture?
Email: amehta@defensenews.com
Twitter: @AaronMehta
Aaron Mehta was deputy editor and senior Pentagon correspondent for Defense News, covering policy, strategy and acquisition at the highest levels of the Defense Department and its international partners.
