Triphibious warfare not only characterized the composite nature of warfare being waged by sea, land, and air forces, it also aptly predicted the trend toward multiservice operations during the next 50 years. Comparing the six-month Guadalcanal fight—the first U.S. campaign of World War II to see enormous violence in all three warfare dimensions—to the four-month Gulf War, we see that our joint task force commanders and their staffs are becoming increasingly adept at coordinating, integrating, and employing the elements of the joint combined- arms team. These are encouraging developments; however, until logistics receives legitimate attention from all participants—and until we have a complementary vision for the logistics concepts that will support the style of warfare that the Revolution in Military Affairs envisions—our military and our nation will receive a minimal return on its investment in joint warfighting. The result could undermine our ability to wage and win the next war.
The Joint Force Commander concept has its roots in the epic Guadalcanal campaign. No other episode in World War II better illustrates the interdependence of the services and the need to employ U.S. military power under joint force commanders. The distinguishing feature of triphibious warfare is its inclusiveness—all elements, including logistics, were inextricably woven together. Perhaps the most important and painful lesson we learned at Guadalcanal was the daunting challenge of logistics, the operational art of bringing together the complex web of services required to support our joint warfighters. Never have so many known so little about such a pivotal part of warfighting than U.S. forces planning and executing the logistics at Guadalcanal. In the end, the exorbitant tragic losses we endured were gruesome evidence of the truth of General Omar Bradley’s assertion that, “Amateurs talk about strategy; professionals talk about logistics.”2
Logistically, the overall picture of the Gulf War achieving spectacular success is as broad and familiar as many of the disastrous details are obscure. Iraq proved to be a weak opponent, but if it had been as tenacious as our Guadalcanal opponent, would our logistics effort have been sufficient? The answer is almost certainly no. As more accurate information about the Gulf War slowly surfaces, it appears that logistically we fought this war the same way we fought Guadalcanal. If there is one concrete theme resonating from Guadalcanal and the Gulf War it is that the triphibious revolution of jointness has not gone far enough in the area of logistics.
The amphibious assault by U.S. forces at Guadalcanal provides an enduring example of the lethal consequences of senior officers failing to fathom the tenets of joint logistics. Logistics support, like warfare in general, does not just happen. If it is to prove successful, it must be properly planned and conducted, meaning the “plan” is attainable, flexible, and sustainable, and the joint commander is aware of all constraints. The supply problem at Guadalcanal was rooted in prewar neglect, poor staff work, and the hasty launching of Operation Watchtower.3
As soon as the war in the Pacific began, U.S. planners quickly dusted off War Plan Orange, an Army-Navy strategy for fighting Japan. Conceived in 1907, the War Plan Orange and its logistics annexes went through numerous transformations. As the actual logistic readiness of the Navy declined during the interwar years, the war plans grew less and less realistic. Thus by fall 1941, the plan called for a joint force capable of sailing from Hawaii and seizing objectives in the Marshalls only 60 days after hostilities began. Most certainly, the day prior to Pearl Harbor the Army could not have mounted such a force, and the Navy could not have transported it.4 Nevertheless, the plan continued to be updated without realistic logistical support.
By the time the Japanese had conquered much of Southeast Asia, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, Director of Naval War Plans, had updated War Plan Orange with a four-stage plan of attack that included an offensive through the Solomons, an island chain that included Guadalcanal. To support these strikes. Admiral Turner defined the logistics requirements that included Main Fleet Advanced Naval Bases called “Lions,” and Secondary Advanced Naval Bases called “Cubs.”5
Admiral Turner got the chance to execute his brainchild as Guadalcanal’s Amphibious Force Commander. When Admiral Ernest J. King learned the Japanese were beginning work on an airfield at Guadalcanal, he hastily ordered Watchtower to start within a month, which left no time to refine logistics support. Admiral Turner soon discovered that his plan like the German Schlieffen Plan of World War I, was operationally brilliant but logistically impracticable.6 The Navy could not provide adequate sealift for all the troops, supplies, and vehicles, and Admiral Turner’s South Pacific base system was not ready to support Watchtower.7 Although considerable attention and practice had crafted a doctrine of amphibious assault, little searching thought and no realistic practice had been afforded in conducting a sizable landing from crude bases 6,000 miles from the United States.
Admiral Turner did not realize that most of the South Pacific Islands they intended to use as forward naval bases lacked such rudimentary elements as potable water, habitation. fresh food, roads, and docks. Operating under such primitive conditions was a tough challenge, but the most difficult challenge was dealing with the critical shortage of fuel. Planners, for example, never foresaw that refueling B-17s at forward bases like Santo, New Herbides, would involve dumping steel drums of fuel over the sides of the cargo vessels and then towing them ashore where they were manhandled. Since one single B-17 drank up 50 drums of aviation fuel each mission, all available hands worked on the bucket lines. To support the initial Guadalcanal landing. Colonel Saunders and his entire Army air crews worked a bucket line 20 hours straight through a driving storm to put 2,500 gallons aboard each of the bombers.8 Likewise, no one predicted the problems that arose at Noumea, New Caledonia-the pivotal forward base supporting the Guadalcanal operation. Located almost 1,000 miles from Guadalcanal and 6,500 miles from San Francisco, Noumea suffered from not only limited docking facilities but also limited coordination between the Army and Navy. This resulted, at times, in upwards of 80 partially unloaded vessels waiting idle in the harbor to be off-loaded.9 Such a delay created longer turnaround times back to San Francisco.
Thus, prewar neglect and poor staff work created a complicated logistical problem for Guadalcanal that showed a lack of consideration for the principles of survivability and sustainability. Tactically, the critical problem was air cover. Enough combat power was needed to get the landing force and their supplies ashore and to provide uninterrupted resupply for the duration of the operation. To counter Japanese land-based aircraft that were within range of Guadalcanal, the Americans had three carriers and Army Air Force B-17s flying from Santo. Fortunately, the amphibious landings achieved both tactical and strategic surprise as the Japanese were totally caught off guard, but the Japanese were quick to strike back, which cut short the off load of troops and supplies. With almost 2,000 more Marines left to off-load and only half their supplies ashore, the Marines encountered their first attack from both the air and the ground.
From the outset, the absence of both supplies and aircraft threatened the survival of U.S. forces as much as the prospect of more Japanese forces descending on Guadalcanal. It was obvious our triphibious team could not hold Guadalcanal if they could not get supplies in, and they could not get supplies in if the Japanese bombers continued to come down and bomb the ships unloading supplies.11' Thus began the six-month struggle for Guadalcanal with one side trying to ensure the safe arrival of troops and supplies on the island and the other side determined to frustrate those attempts." Simply put, the heart of the first few weeks as well as the ensuing six-month battle was logistics. We had achieved surprise and seized the initiative, but we were unable to keep the enemy off balance and exploit our success because of inadequate support.
Recasting the first few weeks of the Gulf War from a Guadalcanal perspective, one gets a weird sense of deja vu. Those first U.S. trigger-pullers arriving shortly after Iraq’s excursion to Kuwait must have had a sick sensation that something they were experiencing had happened before. One of the most memorable low points of the Gulf War was when U.S. troops—like those first Guadalcanal Marines—were left to defend themselves without adequate supplies. As with Guadalcanal, the supply problems of the Gulf War lay rooted in prewar neglect, poor staff work, and the hasty launching of Operation Desert Shield.
As soon as Iraq overran Kuwait, Central Command planners, responsible for the defense of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula, quickly dusted off OPLAN 1002-90, which was based on a global threat of a Soviet attack through Iran. During summer 1990, President George Bush announced a new defense strategy that shifted the threat from global to regional.12 As a result, CentCom was in the process of revising the plan when Iraq launched its attack. Although CentCom had war-gamed their draft plan, the final logistical support plan and time-phased force and deployment data (a computer-based master list for sequencing joint cargo and personnel) did not exist. Simply put, OPLAN 1002-90 was not complete, and specific deployment data was lacking.13 In fact. General Norman Schwarzkopf’s logistic planner, Lieutenant General William Pagonis, wrote the original logistic plan for the Gulf War while flying to Saudi Arabia.14
General Schwarzkopf, like Admiral Turner, got the chance to execute his plans. Fortunately, the U.S. Peace Hawk program during the 1980s provided Saudi Arabia with $5 billion to build several air bases, including Dhahran, the largest air strip in the world. In addition, the United States assisted in building two immense roll-on/roll-off ports. Unfortunately, however, General Schwarzkopf was relying on 19 days of pre-hostility deployments and nine more days of deployments after hostilities began before lead enemy elements reached defensive positions near Al-Jubayl. Obviously, these plans were overly optimistic. Once General Schwarzkopf could dispatch military forces, he immediately inserted the 82nd Airborne without any logistic support structure. The gravity of the situation is illustrated by the elite paratroopers soon relying on Marines for rations.15 Subsequently, he decided to “step up and expand the deployment of combat forces, especially antiarmor assets such as A-10 units, at the expense of badly needed spare parts and ammunition.”16 By accelerating the deployment of combat forces and deferring deployment of theater logistic forces. General Schwarzkopf tried to impress the Iraqis with a conspicuous display of firepower, but the troops were vulnerable, because without needed supplies they could not maneuver and fight. Likewise, the first Air Force fighter squadrons to arrive also were immediately vulnerable because of inadequate support. For example, 48 F-15 Eagles flew nonstop to Dhahran, accomplishing a new record for the longest overseas deployment ever made by U.S. fighters, but once they got there, the fighters sat on the Dhahran runway with scarcely enough fuel to fly. Over the next several days as more fighters arrived, they too sat on the Dhahran runway with scarcely enough fuel, except for the short publicity sorties made for the benefit of television news crews.17 It took several more days before their ground crews and maintenance equipment arrived and the fuel shortage was solved.
As Title V—the final report to Congress on the conduct of the Persian Gulf War—summarizes, “Although U.S. forces arrived quickly, there was a lengthy period of vulnerability during which Coalition forces could not have repulsed an Iraqi invasion.”18 Put another way, inserting forces into theater without adequate logistics substantially raises the risk of defeat.
Half a century has elapsed since we first deployed “triphibious” forces into a theater to blunt the advances of an aggressor. Building upon that triphibious experience at Guadalcanal, we have moved continually toward joint solutions; in 1986, jointness became codified with the passage of Goldwater-Nichols. The aim of that statute is to move beyond “mutual cooperation” without diminishing the unique spirit and skills of each service. Goldwater- Nichols is no panacea, but with jointness as the military’s mantra, it seemed to usher in a “bright new era” of team playing that culminated in the unparalleled success in the Gulf War.19
It is hard to dislike the logistics success of the Gulf War—even when carefully extricating and examining the hurdles that plagued Coalition forces during the initial moments of occupying Saudi Arabia. Logistics got rave reviews. No hyperbole seemed too great; terms such as “logistics miracle” were evoked to characterized our victory.20 John Chancellor of NBC News said, “This was a logistician’s war. Logistics, the movement of troops and supplies, made all the difference.”21 Conventional wisdom has it that our logistics effort during Operation Desert Storm was next to spectacular. Lost in the praise of our logistics accomplishments is the fact that logistics support during the Gulf War—especially during the first two weeks—was in disarray. In fact, logistic support looked almost like Guadalcanal support on a bad day. Using our World War II approach that substituted brute force and deployment of massive quantities of material for a well- managed logistics support effort, our computers successfully sent twice as much material to the Persian Gulf as we needed.22 The numbers were staggering: the mobilization of 55,000 troops, the shipment of 7,000,000 tons of supplies, and the pumping of 1.3 billion gallons of fuel.23 In addition, half of the 40,000 bulk containers shipped into the theater had to be opened to identify their contents.
Guadalcanal—not the Gulf War—is a better model of what we likely will face in the future. Unlike during the Gulf War, we probably will not have a prebuilt shore infrastructure—airfields, roads, terminals, ports—already in place and several months to get our forces and logistics ready. In addition, we cannot count on every future opponent to simply give up without a fight. More likely, as in Guadalcanal, we will encounter a compelling enemy who is bent on crushing us immediately as we attempt to plant our forces ashore.
Viewing Gulf War logistics through the experience of the Guadalcanal campaign, we see a potentially disastrous division between combat arms and those in a supporting role. Clearly, we do not believe that warfighters are from Mars and logisticians are from Venus, but when we focus our logistic telescope on these two campaigns, there is enough of a supplier-to-shooter gap to make anyone wonder whether warfighters and logisticians inhabit the same planet. The widest point in this gap occurred in our lackluster planning to support the Guadalcanal operations, but gap-watchers did have a vivid moment during the first two weeks of the Gulf War as the age-old tension between the interest of warfighters and logisticians arose. The issue is not the importance of logistics but the unconscious assumptions of a warfighting culture that believes that the unglamorous and under appreciated activities of logistics should be left to a beleaguered species we call logisticians. Comfortable with placing logistics on the back burner, warfighters are focusing on glamorous innovations such as exotic weaponry and the promising marvels of high- tech gadgetry. This approach has unknowingly placed jointness in a funk; it is lost in the funhouse of technological change, not heeding Martin Van Creveld’s enduring warning that “logistics make up as much as nine tenths of the business of War.”24 Put simply, logistics defines operations at the operational level. A campaign plan that cannot be logistically supported is not a plan at all but simply an expression of fanciful wishes.25
Creating an illusion of support for the trigger pullers is “voodoo logistics.” If we are to improve in triphibious warfare, warfighters must replace their belief in the foolery of voodoo logistics and understand that there is an art to logistics for which they—not the logisticians—bear primary responsibility. Embracing such a responsibility implies a commitment to ensure that logistic innovation keeps pace with warfighting innovations.
The next-generation of warfighting tools may be more glamorous to talk about, but the battle plans of the next century also must focus on logistic innovations required to support our triphibians. As long as warfighters turn a blind eye to the art of logistics, poor logistics support will continue. By sugarcoating the early logistics chaos of the Gulf War, warfighters are convincing themselves that future success hinges on the marvels of technology. But the result may be another Guadalcanal predicament where scarce logistics constrain our ability to fight. And sure enough, an embattled triggerpuller, lacking adequate logistics and shrinking in churlish resentment, will get that deja vu abandoned feeling as he waits for the magical support of voodoo logistics.
1 Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal (Penguin Books, 1992), p. 600.
2John Pimlott and Stephen Badsey, "The Gulf War Assessed,” Arms and Armour, 1992, p. 81.
3 Frank, p. 134.
4 Duncan Ballantine, U.S. Naval Logistics in the Second World War, Princeton, 1947, p. 34.
5 VAdm. George Dyer, USN, The Amphibious Came to Conquer, U.S. Government Printing Office, Vol. 1, p. 253.
6 Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1977), PP. 2-3.
7 Allan R. Millet, Semper Fidelis (Free Press, 1991), p. 365.
8 Craven and Crate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983), p. 38.
9 Richard Leighton and Robert Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), p. 399.
10 Dyer, pp. 413-415
11 Frank Uhlig, "How Navies Fight, and Why,” The Naval War College Review, Winter 1995, p. 43.
12 Title V, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War (U.S. Government Printing Office, April 1992), p. 349.
13 Ibid, p. 352.
14 Lt.Gen. William Pagonis, USA, “Good Logistics is Combat Power,” Military Review, September 1991, p. 29.
15 Lt.Col. David Evans, USMC (Ret.), “From the Gulf,” Proceedings, January 1991, p. 77
16 Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The General’s War (Little Brown, 1995), p. 63.
17 Duncan Anderson, "The Build Up,” The Gulf War Assessed (Arms and Armor Press, 1992), p. 85.
18 Title V, p. 390.
19 John Quigley, "Creating Joint Warfighters,” Proceedings, September 1995, p. 62.
20 Lt.Gen. Gary Mear, USAF, and Lieutenant Ted Kim, USA, "Logistics: The Way Ahead,” JFQ, p. 39.
21 Paul Kaminski, "The Revolution in Defense Logistics, Defense Issues, Vol 10, Number 107, p. 1.
22 Ibid, p. 5.
23 Title V, p. 394; Lt.Gen. William G. Pagonis, Moving Mountains (Harvard Business School Press, 1992), introduction.
24 Martin Van Creveld, p. 231.
25 U.S. Marine Corps, Warfighting Course 8501, Vol. 1, 2B-B-10.
Commander Pierce recently was a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. He is the prospective commanding officer of the USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41).