The Navy Needs a Lot More Logistics, or a Different Strategy

“…[I]n its relation to strategy, logistics assumes the character of a dynamic force, without which the strategic conception is simply a paper plan.”¹  

The Russia-Ukraine war has put combat logistics in the spotlight. Much like Germany’s attacks on England did in 1939-1941, Russia’s aggression today can serve as advanced warning about what will be required to sustain high-end conflict in the future. U.S. and allied military leaders must avail themselves of the lessons being taught and take prompt and effective measures to be ready when the next great power war comes. 

During its 30 years as the world’s sole superpower, the United States’ force structure, doctrine, industrial base, and logistics have been skewed to support peacetime power projection in relatively benign environments.² 

Recent research has illuminated the issues surrounding logistical support for a high-end fight more than 5,000 miles from the continental United States. In their 2019 study, Timothy Walton and his colleagues explored all aspects of logistics for a western Pacific fight, recommending a balanced and much larger logistics force than the U.S. Navy currently operates or is planning.³ While the most recent shipbuilding and force structure plans do not incorporate the study’s recommendations in quantity, the Navy appears to be using it as a benchmark.⁴

Even so, given the Navy’s experience in the Pacific in World War II, the numbers recommended in the study seem inadequate. For example, the authors base their oil tanker numbers on U.S. Transportation Command 2016 testimony—numbers that do not account for attrition. In July 1945, the U.S. delivered more than 25 million barrels of oil to the western Pacific, in just one month. The conditions were different, and the quantity of forces needing support would dwarf the size and demands of U.S. forces today, but the scale is telling. Similar arguments can be made for requirements to replenish ammunition, recover, repair, and maintain ships, support shore-based forces, and care for wounded and sick.

Shedding light on the scale of a Pacific campaign’s logistics effort and the organizational adjustments needed to accomplish the mission, Trent Hone renders a singular service. His July 2023 article in the Journal of Military History on Pacific Fleet logistics in World War II highlights the real and serious problems presented to Admiral Nimitz and his commanders, and how the Navy essentially invented the logistics capabilities that allowed the fleet to fight at sea for extended periods. The shift from requisition-based logistics (logistics pull) to flow-based logistics (logistics push) was fundamental to that success, and it depended on an agile and adaptive organization that was willing to cast aside prewar assumptions in the face of new realities.⁵

Combined, the Walton and Hone articles help lay out the logistics demands for a war in the western Pacific in this decade or next. They articulate the challenges today’s Navy and joint force commanders and logisticians face: Sustaining a joint and combined fight against a determined and capable enemy far from home and in the enemy’s backyard.

The War of 2026 Scenario

A China/Taiwan/United States conflict would be fundamentally different from anything experienced by those on active duty today. Indeed, it would different from anything since 1945.⁶ As with many great power wars of the past, it would likely be long, even though the protagonists might desire it to be short. It would have a dramatic impact on the global economy, requiring the United States to realign trade to sustain its own economy as well as those of allies and partners. That trade will need to be protected, just as that of the enemy will need to be interdicted. 

The U.S. military likely would have to fight outnumbered against a highly capable and determined opponent, at a significant distance and industrial production disadvantage. And the U.S. homeland and infrastructure may be at risk.⁷

Logistics Challenge: Scope and Depth

U.S. military leaders’ public comments indicate a growing awareness of the disparity between post-Cold War logistics processes and what will be needed in a future high-end fight. 

“Operating in uncontested environments our logistics enterprises operate on business principles. Those business principles were to resupply the force at maximum efficiency so that the American taxpayer dollar could be applied to combat power at the greatest point of need. . . . In our operational plans for high-end combat, we’ve got to think less in terms of maximum efficiency and more in terms of maximum effectiveness.”⁸ 

Navy Vice Admiral Rick Williamson echoed this sentiment in his 2019 testimony before the House Armed Services Committee:“Today’s security environment demands a naval logistics enterprise focused on sustainment as a warfighting function, with a warfighting approach to delivering combat-effective logistics.”⁹

The scale and depth of the logistics requirements to sustain a joint and combined campaign in the western Pacific would be immense. Not only will combatant forces require fuel at wartime rates, but also ammunition, provisions, spare parts, repair, replacement personnel and replacement systems. Post-Cold War reliance on hub-and-spoke logistics—in-theater bases safe from sea and air attack—will no longer work. The Navy and the joint force must shift to a mobile logistics system. 

As former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work wrote in 2005, “…the contemporary Sea-based Transport Fleet is an ‘access-sensitive’ force optimized for unimpeded and guarded access scenarios, and heavily dependent on the availability of deep-water ports and airfields in a forward theater. This is a far cry from the World War II Sea-based Operational Maneuver Fleet, which was designed primarily for conditions of contested or uncertain access.”¹⁰

During World War II in the Pacific, logistics requirements constantly outpaced capacities and estimates. In part this was due to consumption that defied prewar estimates.¹¹ It was also caused by other factors, including continuously growing force numbers, constant pressure to accelerate the campaign, and the need to support the increasing number of shore installations that sustained the campaign.¹² Such were the dynamics of projecting sustained combat power across the ocean into the teeth of enemy resistance that, according to Navy Rear Admiral Worrall Carter, the logistics organization was never quite able to get ahead of demand.¹³

The logistics demands in early 1945 for naval forces are an apt example. Admiral Halsey, with 111 ships, entered the South China Sea in January 1945 on a sweep against Japanese shipping. His ships consumed 1,599,000 barrels of fuel oil in two weeks—the equivalent of about nine ship loads from today’s Kaiser-class oilers.¹⁴ In a separate example Admiral King reported that the stocks on hand at Guam, “…would have filled a train 120 miles long.”¹⁵ 

The quantities and the organizations required to ensure their constant flow were unimagined before the war and had to be invented and developed on the fly. While a war in the western Pacific in this decade would be different from World War II, planners need to accept prewar logistics assumptions are likely to be well off the mark. "The most significant implication of this basic decision to improvise logistic support was that we had no real idea of the amount of logistic support that would be necessary to maintain the combat effectiveness of the fleet."¹⁶

Logistics is the Commander’s Purview

Rear Admiral Henry Eccles wrote prolifically about naval operational logistics after World War II. In his several books, he frequently emphasized the point that logistics is the purview of the commander. "The command point of view is that logistics itself has no purpose other than to create and to support combat forces which are responsive to the needs of command."¹⁷

It is interesting that he felt the need to write that sentence at all. His was urging commanders—and line officers in general—to pay adequate attention to logistics and not simply leave it up to the experts—Supply Corps officers. The latter do a tremendous job, but logistics in war is more than just moving goods and services to the fleet. 

The commander focuses on combat effectiveness while the logistician is governed by efficiency. As Trent Hone points out, both are required in a major war, but it is up to the commander to define when each holds sway.¹⁸ Surrendering consideration of logistics to the logisticians defies this wisdom. 

Hone further argues that the Pacific Fleet evolved a flow-based supply system during the war. This entailed some waste, but the focus of Admiral Nimitz and his logisticians was to provide effective support to combat forces. This is the point then-Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Sam Paparo made in 2023. “In our operational plans for high-end combat, we’ve got to think less in terms of maximum efficiency and more in terms of maximum effectiveness.”¹⁹

Prewar Planning and Exercises

Much like its pre-World War II counterpart, today’s Navy is focused on combat forces at the expense of logistics capacity. Before World War II, Navy combatant ship numbers more than doubled while auxiliary numbers barely grew.²⁰ Beyond this increasingly skewed force structure, the Navy’s exercises not only paid scant attention to logistics, but they were also constrained by existing logistical shortcomings. As Duncan Ballantine pointed out just after the war: "Limited fuel for cruising, the lack of auxiliary vessels and of suitably prepared advance positions from which a major force might operate continuously all served to constrict the range of fleet exercises and war games. Too frequently the criterion determining the Navy's annual operating plan was not our military or strategic situation but rather the fact of having to live within its meager budget."²¹

In this way operational concepts were developed that failed during wartime. As Ballantine further argued, "In the administration of the peacetime Navy there were many established procedures which could obviously not be employed by an overseas force cut off from . . . the continental shore establishment. Yet the habits of peacetime support persisted.”

The consequence of this distortion of force structure, doctrine, training, and logistics was significant when the war started. It nearly cost the United States the war in the southwest Pacific.²² Despite the development of War Plan Orange, logistical doctrine remained rudimentary. Pearl Harbor was the only advance base in the Pacific short of the Philippines, and it was barely able to support the fleet in peacetime. The prewar concept of the mobile base that would be moved forward was inadequate and was eventually superseded by new concepts of mobile logistics support.²³

Fiscal vs. Wartime Realities

One could argue that, while all these examples of organizational and industrial accomplishments in World War II might be true, the situation today is wholly different. The United States lacks the industrial depth and excess capacity needed to surge production, and it lacks the fiscal resources to address those shortcomings. Consequently, doctrine must acknowledge current force structure constraints. 

Today’s fiscal constraints are real, and it takes an inordinate amount of time and resources to produce the necessary platforms, weapons, and spare parts within those constraints. The Chief of Naval Operations staff (OpNav) and the various Navy systems commands are largely consumed by executing such tasks. Yet, operating within current fiscal constraints blinds planners to alternatives to answer the challenges. Concepts such as Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) and Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations (EABO) are in part driven by today’s fiscal constraints. But given the possibilities of a future war against China, are they viable? If the Navy and Marine Corps had enough resources, what alternative warfighting doctrines and associated force structures might be developed? Would they be better able to prevail in the western Pacific? 

While the resources are currently not available, the Navy could benefit from considering an unconstrained budget, if for no other reason than to suggest alternatives. In terms of logistics, the exercise might be to design platforms to sustain a trans-Pacific campaign in the face of strong opposition over a long period of time. Put those designs on the shelf so that they are available if the resources are provided. The alternative is evident in the Navy’s five-year shipbuilding plan, which intends to buy only three of the new, small oilers (T-AOL) starting in FY 26. And the design will be a small ship that may not be well suited to supporting dispersed surface action groups (SAGs) with all the commodities needed to remain on station. The build rate is too slow, and the capacity may be insufficient.²⁴

Something must give. Either sufficient sealift is found or created—including the crews needed to man the ships—or strategic and operational concepts must change. Ignoring logistics while holding tight to preferred ways of fighting risks defeat.

Self-Sufficiency and Repair

The first sentence in Admiral Eccles’ book Operational Naval Logistics is telling: “One of the strongest elements in the United States Fleet logistics in World War II was the Navy's traditional high degree of peacetime indoctrination in self-support and economy."²⁵ 

Eccles takes pains to underscore the importance of self-sufficiency. Today’s Navy walked away from that concept in the early 2000s, shifting maintenance and repair capabilities ashore to reduce manning.²⁶ Actions since the late 2010s have begun to reverse that trend, but restoring historical levels of self-sufficiency will take time. In a future conflict involving battle damage, the ability of ships’ forces to effect emergency repairs without outside assistance will be critical. Without getting into a discussion of the survivability of ships against modern weapons, World War II examples of battle damage control can be instructive. The aircraft carrier USS Franklin (CV-13) suffered severe damage and the loss of more than 700 sailors, including the bulk of her repair parties, but was still able to effect sufficient repairs at sea to allow her to exit the threat area.²⁷ There are many other examples. The key to them all was organic repair capability, sufficient and well-trained crews, and, in most cases, access to tugs and in-theater repair and medical care. A crew’s knowledge of ship systems stems directly from the need to conduct periodic maintenance (PMS). That knowledge, in turn, is critical to battle damage control and repair. 

Time to Change Course?

The Navy recognizes it has a logistics problem, but the scope and depth of that problem may not have been internalized yet. Focused on challenges to its combat forces and the consequent need to maximize their numbers and capabilities, the Navy is following its traditional neglect of logistics. From inadequate logistics force building programs, insufficient access to merchant shipping, the lack of logistics testing and experimentation in exercises, to operational doctrines that reflect fiscal constraints, the Navy is struggling with logistics.

It is unlikely that today’s Navy can repeat what it accomplished in World War II. Even authors writing soon after the war argued as much.²⁸ But it can do more than is currently being attempted—both in terms of numbers and in searching out alternative operating concepts. Shipbuilding capacity exists in this country, and measures need to be taken now to expand it. Building capacity takes time; building the right supplier base takes time; training the needed work force takes time—but those obstacles will only be overcome if the Navy, Maritime Administration, Defense Department, the Administration, and Congress prioritize them.

Work has begun on acquiring or ensuring access to needed sealift, particularly tankers. But as with manufacturing capacity, more is required, and action is needed now. With a realistic laydown of logistics requirements, designs can be developed even if funding for procurement is not yet available. Such a study should expand on that done by Walton and his colleagues in 2019.²⁹ 

In the end the Navy must decide what it wants to do and argue vehemently for the logistics force structure it will need. Today’s logistics force is sized to support the current Navy in peacetime and short combat operations in a permissive environment. The War of 2026 Scenario cannot be prosecuted with a peacetime force. To fight a long war against China with the existing infrastructure would require a wholly new approach, one that avoids challenging China’s area-denial system. With existing forces and logistics—even if expanded along the lines of the Navy’s long-range shipbuilding plan—U.S. strategy might be limited to a peripheral approach that husbands naval strength while wearing down the adversary. 

This is the choice the United States faces: either build the Navy and commensurate logistics capacity to fight a head-to-head war in the western Pacific or heed the advice of Admiral Winnefeld's “Mine Warfare Could Be Key” and Captain Clarity's “Tighten the Belt and Cut the Roads" to look more broadly for ways to bring U.S. maritime power to bear against a capable adversary. A peripheral approach may be necessary.