By air or by sea

Winston Churchill may have said it best: "Victory is the beautiful, bright-colored flower. Transport is the stem without which it never could have blossomed."

It's a lesson armies have learned and relearned throughout history: No matter how brilliant a leader's tactics, how well-- trained the troops, or how powerful their weapons, if they can't get to the fight, those things hardly matter.

At the height of the ColdWar, in 1978, officials across the U.S. government participated in a table-top planning exercise designed to test their ability to react to an attack by Warsaw Pact nations against NATO forces in Europe. They failed the test. During the simulation, the Defense Department couldn't locate more than 200,000 soldiers required by their war plans. Confusion stymied the deployment of U.S.-based troops to Europe. In one telling instance, aircraft received 27 requests to move a single unit to 27 different places. Most of the 400,000 U.S. troops already in Europe "died" within weeks because they ran out of ammunition.