The U.S. Army will hold a seminar this summer to improve the joint force’s ability to quickly and effectively manage logistics and sustainment at the outset of a large-scale war, according to the Army Materiel Command commander.
The seminar will include Air Mobility Command, U.S. Transportation Command and Air Force Materiel Command as well as a “host of other senior leaders,” said Gen. Charles Hamilton, who took over AMC a year ago. The event will focus on coordination in “the first 30 to 60 days of going into a conflict,” he said.
While the Army is required to support the joint force’s logistics and sustainment needs in operations globally, planning and managing the vast network of moving equipment from fort to port and into theater, as well as maintaining capability on the battlefield, has been siloed among the services. But in actual operations, it’s a joint effort.
When Hamilton took over AMC, he immediately changed the command’s mission statement to focus on the joint global force.
“I’ve never gone into a major operation without it being joint,” he said at a March 13 Association of the U.S. Army event in Arlington, Virginia. “In fact, I’m held to that standard to support joint, so why not embrace it and articulate that back to the Army, and in particular [the Office of the Secretary of Defense], that potentially could lead to some resources down the road?”
All of the moving parts across these commands result in a “congested space,” Hamilton said. “There’s a lot of moving pieces and what we’ve got to do is detangle it and integrate better in time.”
With the new focus on how to do all of this in a contested environment, “it’s really going to get interesting and sporty,” he added.
The seminar will focus on the Army’s most challenging operational theater – the Indo-Pacific. The Army continues to build its capability in the Pacific and a major aspect of its pivot to the region will be to work through theater sustainment and logistics and setting the theater in order to deter China’s aggression.
In the fiscal 2025 budget request released Monday, the Army’s portion of the Pacific Deterrence Initiative would be $1.5 billion. The service plans to spend $461.4 million on Operation Pathways exercises and another $337 million for other exercises with allies and partners in the Pacific, a 200% increase over FY24. The service also wants to spend $38 million in theater sustainment there.
The Army is requesting funding for contested logistics including new watercraft, command-and-control gear, and point-of-need sustainment capabilities.
While some experimentation exists already with the Joint Staff, the seminar in August will “take it to a larger scale” and bring in experts and industry partners to contribute to the conversation, Hamilton said.
While allies and partners will not be a part of the conversation in this first round, the Army plans to include them down the road because their participation “is a huge part of the equation,” he said, adding that there’s “no way we go into a large-scale fight without relying on allies and partners for supply chain, airfields and ports.”
Taking what comes out of the seminar, Hamilton said the Army will design an exercise that is solely focused on sustaining the force over the first two months of operations in large-scale combat to see how planners and commanders react to the situation.
Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.
