Healthy Supply Chain Keeps Army in the Future Fight
Healthy Supply Chain Keeps Army in the Future Fight

As the Army and the other services transform to meet the needs of future conflicts, the military’s logistics capability must also keep pace, the director of the Defense Logistics Agency said.
“Each of the services is going through a deep transformation cycle currently. We have to make sure that our logistics capability is also going through a deep transformation,” Lt. Gen. Mark Simerly said during a panel on supply chain health at an Association of the U.S. Army Hot Topic on the industrial base. “The scale” of future conflict “is global, and the time frame is protracted,” he said. “I think we have to get over the mythology of this short, sharp fight and understand what we have to prepare for.”
As global supply chains recover, particularly after the COVID-19 pandemic, the Army is working to fight effectively amid a “resource-constrained environment,” said Liz Miranda, executive deputy to the commanding general of Army Materiel Command.
“We don't have all the money in the world to maintain everything hot and ready,” she said. “We may have to keep some things warm and some things cold so that we can leverage and focus on the right things that our Army needs and our soldiers need to fight. In a resource constrained environment, that's very challenging.”
The Army needs to be prepared for global supply chain challenges and expect “constant disruption,” said retired Lt. Gen. Mary Legere, managing director of Accenture Global Defense and former deputy Army chief of staff for intelligence, G-2. She cited the war in Ukraine as an example.
“We need to rise to this challenge. The level and speed and pace of change is something that we have to understand,” she said. “Global supply chains are reacting to geopolitical realities of the world dividing again and camps forming. … We're up against a long struggle where, once again, supply chains are going to choose sides.”
The future fight will be won through sustainment, Simerly said. “As we think about where we are today, the risk to our fight, I really like the language that was used recently where we said, as a nation, we're in an undeclared state of emergency,” he said. “The only requirement is winning. We have to find how we're going to sustain the surge and contraction of future conflict so that we can win through sustainment.”