Contested logistics has quickly become a new focus for the Navy and Marine Corps. The logistics mastery that the United States has relied on to fight and win wars has eroded. To ensure warfighters and their platforms can by supplied and sustained in a future fight, the Navy and Marine Corps need to look beyond conventional examples of contested logistics and toward more adaptive and innovative models. The illegal narcotics trade, specifically the movement of cocaine from the Andes mountains in South America to markets in the United States and Europe, provides a wealth of lessons for contested logistics.
The Problem
Service leaders have begun to beat the drum on the importance of bolstering the Sea Services’ logistics. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday admitted in a panel last year that the Navy had never fully developed a “plan for sustaining the fleet in a fight.” In the same meeting, Commandant of the Marine Corps General David H. Berger stressed that both the Navy and the Marine Corps needed to focus on “contested logistics” and that there was “lot of work to do there.” The Commandant also highlighted logistics in his Force Design 2030 report, writing that he did not believe logistics had received “sufficient attention” so far in the Marines’ new force design efforts.
Civilian experts have been making similar arguments. A critical report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments found that the “current and programmed defense maritime logistics force . . . is inadequate to support the current U.S. National Defense Strategy and major military operations against China or Russia.” And in a Proceedings article last year, Eric Limpaecher and I highlighted the gap between current operational needs and logistics capability. There is an urgent need for innovative solutions to the logistical dilemmas that await the Navy and Marine Corps in a future conflict.
The Pentagon is starting to respond to the growing demand signal from across the services, including with the development of a Joint Concept for Contested Logistics, but significant investments lag, with money going to missiles, and fighter aircraft instead of logistics platforms.
But as much as the current logistics network suffers from underinvestment, it also suffers from lack of imagination. While the services certainly suffer from readiness issues and ailing transport ships, the way the services view logistics is dated. Not only do they need new platforms, but they need to refresh their thinking.
Logistics Lessons from the Drug Trade
Since President Richard M. Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” in 1971, the U.S. government has spent an estimated $1 trillion dollars on counter narcotics. The U.S. government has used a variety of approaches to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, from deploying an array of radars mounted on blimps which guard the Southern Border to directly supporting operations in the mountains and jungles of South and Central America. The military has even deployed B-1 bombers to track drug smugglers.
Yet, despite decades of work and the deployment of high-profile assets, the issue of illegal drugs persists in the United States. The Drug Enforcement Agency’s 2019 Drug Threat Assessment reported that the agency expected to see “increased domestic availability [of cocaine]” and reduced domestic prices” which would increase corresponding law enforcement problems. It is not clear that the United States has made any substantial progress in stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the country, let alone “winning” the war.
Cocaine is refined from the leaves of the coca plant, Erythroxylon coca, most of which is grown in Colombia. After it is refined, traffickers move their cocaine to the Pacific or Caribbean coast where more than 80 percent will be shipped out of South America via maritime means through the transit zone. The transit zone is what law enforcement calls the millions of square miles of Eastern Pacific Ocean and Western Caribbean used by traffickers to move their product north. In many ways it is here that the shipments are most vulnerable. The emptiness of the sea can make it difficult to hide, and traffickers can be interdicted in the open ocean by law enforcement authorities from any country provided their vessels are unflagged and in international waters. It should be no surprise then that this is the part of the trafficking route that has inspired the most innovation and adaptation among traffickers. They use ever-changing means to bring their cargo safely through the transit zone, forcing law enforcement to adjust and adapt to their evolving tactics. But their success generally can be attributed to three key factors: redundancy; multiple platform types; and geographic flexibility.
Redundancy
“I simply sit and watch it go by,” is what former General John Kelly, U.S. Marine Corps, famously said about counter narcotics when he was the Commander, U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom). What he meant is that there are too many vessels moving narcotics through the transit zone to interdict them all. In 2020, Admiral Craig Faller, the current SouthCom commander, acknowledged in testimony that the command was only able to interdict nine percent of known drug movements, which was an increase over previous years. Despite all the high-tech assets employed by SouthCom and U.S. partners in the region, they are only able to interdict a small fraction of drugs moving through the transit zone.
Traffickers “flood the zone” with shipments because they know that, even though some will be interdicted, enough will get through for them to turn a profit. This is possible because of the economic math behind trafficking drugs. Some experts estimate traffickers could still make a profit if as much as 90 percent of their cocaine was interdicted. The remaining 10 percent would still make the business profitable; anything more makes it highly lucrative, and redundancy makes the drug trade resilient. Smuggling platforms are expendable, many are only used on one-way trips and intentionally sunk after delivering their cargo. Further, there are so many platforms that they complicate the calculus of enforcement agencies and force them to spread their assets out, which is similar to what the Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations concept is intended to do.
Multiple Platform Types
In 2000, the Colombian police seized what is now known as the “Facatativa submarine,” in a suburb of Bogotá. It is not the only “narco-submarine” authorities have discovered, but it remains the largest and most sophisticated—so far. Still under construction, the craft was more than 100 feet long; law enforcement estimated that it could have carried as much as 200 tons of cocaine thousands of miles. It was also a fully submersible design, making the vessel a true submarine, unlike the smaller, home-made narco-submarines, officially known as semi-submersibles that police have seized in Colombia. Even though it never put to sea, the Facatativa submarine demonstrates the lengths to which traffickers will go to out-wit law enforcement and move illicit products to market.
(U.S. Coast Guard image)
In addition to submarines and semi-submersible craft, traffickers will use any effective platform. Airplanes used to be common until the air route was effectively shut off by better interdiction and radar coverage in the southern United States. At one point some types of airplanes were unavailable on the second-hand market because they had been all bought and brought to Colombia. Today's delivery mix includes go-fast boats and commercial shipping containers.
Geographic Flexibility
Traffickers have changed the geographic distribution of smuggling routes significantly over time to maintain a steady supply of drugs. Today, most maritime routes flow through the Eastern Pacific and land in Central America, but many of the original routes passed through the eastern Caribbean and ended in southern Florida. In 1993, traffickers flipped the percentages of cocaine moved across the southern border and by maritime routes in just three months in response to a Clinton Administration policy.1 Prior to the flip, 80 percent of the cocaine shipped into the United States came over the southern border; afterwards, 80 percent was shipped via Caribbean routes. Law enforcement cannot adjust that rapidly. Today, routes might be shifting again to take advantage of the Venezuelan government’s permissive and potentially supportive stance regarding drug trafficking.
As in the Western Pacific, the Caribbean geography “seems to have been planned for smuggling operations,” it is crisscrossed with hundreds of islands that straddle the major sea lines of communication.2 Commercial air and sea traffic further crowd the area and the many island states fragment jurisdiction and complicate maritime law enforcement. It should be no surprise that in naval exercises prior to World War II, the Navy used the Caribbean as an analog for the Western Pacific. As today’s Navy and Marine Corps think about combat logistics in the Western Pacific, they should look to the example of narcotraffickers and use complicated geography and shifting lines of communication and supply faster than an adversary can react.
Key Lessons
Narco-traffickers are able to sustain their supply chains in the face of intense law enforcement pressure by shifting routes, changing platforms, and planning for some product to be interdicted. There are three key takeaways for today’s Navy and Marine Corps from the illicit drug logistics of the Caribbean. Plan for attrition. Use inexpensive, redundant platforms and send enough that needed supplies will get through. Do not limit the force to a single platform or modality. The joint force should be able to sustain forward forces by air, land, or sea. The traffickers have consistently shown that the platform does not matter—the cargo does. Go where the enemy is not. Be ready to change your routes on a dime and reorient the logistics force. The drug trade is often thought of as a balloon: squeeze here and the air moves over there – it flexes under pressure, but the volume remains constant. Navy and Marine Corps logistics should function similarly for EABO and DMO. Enemy forces may block certain areas but that will only open up new routes.
This essay was adapted from coursework for the Center for Homeland Security and Defense at the Naval Postgraduate School.
1. James L. Zackrison, “Smuggling and the Caribbean: Tainting Paradise Throughout History,” chapter in Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs and Human Life, (London, UK: Praeger, 2017) 185.
2. Zackrison, “Smuggling and the Caribbean: Tainting Paradise Throughout History,” 181.
3. Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation, (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State Press, 2007) 2.
