Just-in-Time War

HEADNOTE

Moving toward the day when military equipment supplies itself.

In August, the military's top logisticians gathered at U.S. Transportation Command headquarters at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois to figure

out how to get troops, equipment and supplies to the Persian Gulf faster and more efficiently. Despite the lightning-quick dash to Baghdad that opened the 2003 Iraq War, military commanders complained of equipment shortages, slow-moving supply lines, and uncertainty about which units and equipment were moving in and out of the Middle East.

The Pentagon took the first steps toward improving supply-chain management last fall by naming TRANSCOM to oversee how everything from soldiers to socks goes to war. In the past, the military services managed their own supply lines for service-specific items, such as weapon systems and spare parts, and the Defense Logistics Agency oversaw the movement of common items, such as fuel and medical supplies. Because logistics were handled separately, the services often did not know what equipment they were getting until it arrived. For example, an Army commander ordering spare parts for a tank would not know until the part arrived that his order had even been processed.