During the 2009 Afghanistan troop surge, a group of Marines at Camp Bastion passed the time waiting for a flight by playing spades with a “most wanted” deck from a previous deployment to Iraq. This was a deck of cards produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency labeled with high-value enemy targets ranked by their importance. Saddam Hussein was the ace of spades, for example. The Marines began discussing what a deck might look like for their own regiment.
They concluded that the most senior personnel, such as the regimental commander, battalion commanders, and primary staff, might not be the aces. These positions were so critical that the table of organization is designed to make them instantly replaceable by executive officers and deputies. They debated who might be the real aces—the critical losses from which the regiment could not easily recover. They soon found themselves talking about low-density subject-matter experts in support functions—in short, logisticians and key maintenance personnel.
This realization points to the concepts of counter-logistics targeting and assured-logistics analysis: The examination of enemy and friendly support, respectively, to find subtle but critical vulnerabilities to either exploit or protect. Counter-logistics also includes predatory logistics—the seizure and use of enemy assets.
Today, these crucial functions require better integration of the expertise of logisticians in the targeting of enemy logistics and protection of friendly logistics. Predatory logistics requires doctrinal development.
These ideas may seem controversial. As discussions of counter-logistics and assured logistics have spread, particularly at U.S. Naval Forces Europe/Africa and U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa, many Marines respond that these concepts are already found in Marine Corps doctrine, which calls them “targeting” and “force protection.” To be fair, there is nothing so unique about targeting or protecting logistical vulnerabilities that it requires entirely new processes.
However, the results produced by current processes seem consistently limited. Target nominations and force protection efforts often reflect only the most obvious logistics capabilities, often at the strategic and high-operational level, such as enemy stockpiles of critical munitions or similar friendly stockpiles. In the same way, force protection efforts tend to fail to recognize and protect critical vulnerabilities in U.S. military logistics systems. This suggests the need for a more deliberate approach to targeting and force protection specific to logistics. Changes to doctrine, organization, and training are required to better integrate the expertise of logistics subject-matter experts.
Do Potential Benefits Justify Changes?
Before asking how to accomplish this integration, it is important to ask if the resulting force protection and target nominations are likely to be worth it. A growing mountain of tactical and theater-level evidence from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine says yes.
To begin with, each belligerent has engaged in extensive counter-logistics targeting, resulting in successes such as Ukraine’s strikes on Novatek’s Ust-Luga gas terminal in January and on the Shahed drone storage site near Yeysk airbase in September.1 These strikes triggered assured-logistics adaptations. For example, Russia has increased air defenses against drones and moved depots farther from the front.
In addition to spurring changes in tactics and technology to enable counter-logistics strikes, these adaptations have created a need to act against the enemy logistics enterprise in subtler ways, attacking nodes that previously had not been perceived as vulnerabilities or protected. For example, Ukraine has exploited Russia’s systemic recovery capacity shortfalls by targeting Russian support vehicles, and Russia has used “double-tap” strikes to attract first responders and other low-density support capabilities to sites where they can be targeted by a second strike.2
The war in Ukraine also has seen theater-level counter-logistics cyberattacks. These attacks have included unattributed ones against Polish railroads supporting equipment distribution to Ukraine, and anti-Russian partisans claim to have conducted cyberattacks against Belarusian railroads supporting Russia.3 In addition, Ukraine claimed that a cyberattack against the military education programs at North-Caucasus University enabled a secondary counter-logistics cyberattack against the Russian defense contractor OKRUG, which allegedly disrupted resupply and provided substantial logistics-related intelligence.
The war also has highlighted an unusual reliance on a type of counter-logistics targeting: predatory logistics. This is the seizure of enemy assets and resources for friendly use. Both belligerents have engaged in predation for support, both military against military and, in the case of lawless and poorly supported Russian soldiers, against civilians, Ukrainian and Russian alike.5 Predation is so endemic it has resulted in a Ukrainian joke that Russia may be Ukraine’s top supplier of weapons.6
U.S. military logistics personnel generally seem skeptical of predatory logistics. Though predation has been common throughout military history, it has the same dubious quality as Force Design 2030’s discussions of forage.7 Neither seems likely to scale to a useful level. However, that skepticism is now academic, because the U.S. government cast its vote in favor of predatory logistics in October 2023, when U.S. Central Command and the Department of Justice seized munitions from Iran and provided them to Ukraine.8 They did so again in April 2024.9 Since the Department of Defense now explicitly practices predatory logistics, it must develop clear guidelines to govern it.
The Intelligence Of Logistics
Proposals for counter-logistics targeting and assured-logistics analysis tend to revolve around whether they are perceived primarily as logistics or intelligence functions. A commander is equally likely to assign responsibility to the logistics or intelligence section, but neither section alone is sufficient. The analysis can be too logistically technical for intelligence personnel and too enemy-centric for logistics personnel, particularly when they are already consumed with the complexity of supporting friendly operations. Solutions must be drawn from both communities at once.
Three ways to enable counter-logistics targeting and assured-logistics analysis—and, with them, predatory logistics—seem promising. First, doctrinal changes could change the composition of working groups. Second, additional training for logistics and intelligence personnel could make both better at their jobs. Third, organizational changes could result in cross-detailing, putting intelligence personnel in logistics sections or vice versa.
All approaches to changing processes such as cross-functional team composition present complications. For example, force protection and targeting working groups could add more logistics personnel. However, the expertise to make nominations is spread across the logistics section. No single logistician could provide sufficient coverage of all relevant commodities, and sending too many attendees to these working groups could quickly swamp the groups. Representatives from intelligence, targeting, and force-protection processes could join logistics working groups, but this risks wasting the time of external representatives and logisticians in sprawling meetings as they wait on business in which they have no role. Finally, any attempt to split off new working groups is likely to suffer from dilution.
A second problem is that logistics personnel lack sufficient knowledge of targeting and force-protection processes to be useful. Their contributions can be vague, such as asking, “Does the enemy have an equivalent of the Total Ammunition Management Information System? If so, can we use cyber to target that somehow?” These are good questions that could lead to target nominations, but targeteers may only respond, “Is there an O-suffix or BE number?” Logisticians also may lack the security clearances needed to work side-by-side with intelligence counterparts.
In short, changing the composition of teams in the planning process is not enough, but uncovers a training problem: Logisticians know little about targeting or force protection. This suggests training solutions. The common element between counter-logistics targeting and assured-logistics analysis is a skill that could be described as logistics enterprise analysis, so the answer might be training in that skill. Perhaps that could be combined with organizational solutions to place a logistics analyst in the intelligence section, or a targeting and force-protection advocate within the logistics section. These ideas present two problems.
First, analyzing even friendly logistics enterprises is incredibly difficult. Late-career logisticians can struggle to analyze the joint logistics enterprise at the theater level, for example, within one combatant command. If an agency in the intelligence community could effectively train personnel in logistics enterprise analysis, it would probably become the top-level school for the entire logistics community. Second, neither community knows much about the logistics enterprises of even the most widely studied enemy forces. Products are scattered and uneven in quality.10
Bearing these problems in mind, even having two new specially trained Marines—a logistics-savvy analyst in the intelligence section and a targeteer logistician to solicit nominations from across the logistics section—would not be enough. Without wider institutional advocacy to collect intelligence, conduct analysis, and create products, they would always be starting from scratch, doing research to understand the basics of the enemy logistics enterprise.
However, while enabling counter-logistics targeting seems daunting, assured logistics is more straightforward, because it rests on an obvious training problem: Logisticians do not think of their own operations in terms of the indications and warning (I&W) they produce. If logisticians considered their own I&W, that alone would constitute effective assured-logistics analysis by tightly linking logistics planning to force protection. This is such a fundamental problem that it should be added to doctrine as an aspect of the logistics principle of survivability.
Assuming these problems can be solved, and some amount of training and organizational changes can put properly trained personnel in the right places on a staff, there is the question of which staff. Each poses authorities problems. For counter-logistics targeting, high-level authorities are needed to target points in the supply chain that may lie deep in the enemy homeland. Collateral damage assessments are a key requirement for such target analysis. And servicing these targets often requires kinetic (physical weapons) and nonkinetic (cyber weapons) capabilities for which release authority is held high up the chain of command—for example, the use of space and cyber capabilities against enemy logistics command-and-control systems.
In addition, predatory logistics currently lacks sufficient doctrinal development to properly articulate authorities problems. Even the most tentative discussions of using seized enemy food, munitions, or other supplies suggest a high authorities barrier. Without understanding what an investigation might look like if predation went wrong, commanders at all echelons cannot properly weigh the risks to force and mission created by predation versus the benefits it may provide.
For assured logistics, the authorities problem is linked to deception. Because of the limited friendly capabilities to protect dispersed logistics nodes, the preferred option will frequently be deception, but the authorities required for deception operations can require daunting timelines.
In other words, targeting enemy logistics and assuring own-force logistics are complex tasks that demand more than just exchanging personnel. They require institutional advocacy within the intelligence community and training and doctrinal changes within the logistics community. The core skill that both depend on—logistics enterprise analysis—is difficult to develop even in senior personnel. And even after identifying enemy nodes to target or friendly nodes to protect, there are the authorities problems described above.
Recommendations
Bearing these problems in mind, adopting five recommendations could enable counter-logistics targeting, assured-logistics analysis, and predatory logistics.
First, enemy logistics-enterprise analysis requires an advocate in the intelligence community. The Defense Intelligence Agency is the advocate by default, but the Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) should be considered. FMSO is the successor to the Army’s Soviet Army Studies Office, which brought together foreign area officers and academics to produce studies that required a mixture of military, political, and cultural analysis. Today it continues to provide similar cross-disciplinary analyses of understudied aspects of the operating environment. Enemy logistics- enterprise analysis, which exists at an understudied nexus between discussing enemy equipment, formations, and processes and discussing the industry and supply chains behind them, makes FMSO an excellent candidate.
Second, logisticians require training and doctrinal changes to make them conscious of the I&W signals their support operations produce. I&W analysis should be conducted as part of every concept of logistics support plan. Furthermore, deception should always be integrated with logistics planning from the beginning instead of attempting to bolt it onto a logistics plan later.
Third, to mitigate the high authorities involved, counter-logistics targeting should primarily be a theater-level responsibility. Developing mid-career targeteers and logisticians at the theater level who understand these processes would require changes to produce early-career personnel who think in terms of assured-logistics analysis at even the lowest tactical level.
Fourth, predatory logistics requires doctrinal development. This is partly because predation appears to have become an inescapable reality, but mostly because it is fraught with risk in ways that may not be obvious. Doctrine can act as a firewall to prevent overeager personnel from making egregious mistakes and as a light to show the way when predation is advisable.
Fifth, logistics-intelligence integration needs to be further refined through joint training. There have been efforts to do this at the Marine Corps Logistics Operations Group, which created the Logistics Intelligence Planners Course specifically to develop such integration. However, this approached the problem as a need for intelligence personnel to provide better physical network analysis to logisticians, not to facilitate the integration of logistics expertise into processes such as targeting and force protection.
In a war in the western Pacific, when the direct approach against well-studied strongpoints has brought both sides to exhaustion, and horizons are moving from D+30 to D+300, the only remaining vulnerable high-value targets may be logistical. Whether the U.S. military, the enemy, or neither will be prepared for that moment comes down to two logistics-intelligence integration questions. Will targeteers know enough to read the cards, and will logisticians know enough to hide their hand?
1. Sarah Rainsford and Oliver Slow, “Ukraine Drones Hit St Petersburg Gas Terminal in Russia,” BBC News, 21 January 2024; and Ron Popeski, “Ukraine’s Military Says It Hit Base Storing Drones in Southern Russia,” Reuters, 9 October 2024.
2. Vikram Mittal, “Russia and Ukraine Are Focusing Attacks on Each Other’s Supply Lines,” Forbes, 8 August 2024; and Vitaly Shevchenko, “Ukraine War: Russian Double-Tap Strikes Hit Civilians Then Rescuers Too,” BBC News, 14 April 2024.
3. Marek Strzelecki, “Poland Investigates Hacking Attack on State Railway Network,” Reuters, 28 August 2023; and Max Smeets and Brita Achberger, “Cyber Hacktivists Are Busy Undermining Putin’s Invasion,” The Washington Post, 13 May 2022.
4. Kateryna Zakharchenko, “Ukraine’s Hur Cyber Strike Shuts Down Russian Military University, Erases 150TB of Critical Data,” Kyiv Post, 11 October 2024.
5. Moscow Times Staff, “Residents of Belgorod Region Complain of Russian Military Looting,” Moscow Times, 15 June 2023.
6. Sophia Ankel, “Ukraine’s Counteroffensive Would Fall Apart without All the Russian Vehicles It Has Captured, Frontline Mechanic Says,” Business Insider, 15 August 2023.
7. Brian Donlon, “Logistics 2030: Foraging Is Not Going to Cut It,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 150, no. 11 (November 2023).
8. Natasha Bertrand, “Exclusive: U.S. Will Transfer Weapons Seized from Iran to Ukraine,” CNN, 5 October 2023.
9. U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Columbia, “Remaining Munitions Seized En Route from Iran to Yemen Transferred to Ukrainian Armed Forces,” www.justice.gov, 9 April 2024.
10. With some highly notable exceptions, including the Army War College’s PLA Logistics and Sustainment Conference (press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/958/), CNA’s study of Russian logistics in the Ukraine War funded by European Command’s Russian Strategic Initiative, and the Army Training and Doctrine Command Foreign Military Studies Office’s comprehensive “The Russian Way of War” by Lester Grau and Charles Bartles, address logistics in a level of detail useful for logistics practitioners.
