DELIVERING THE GOODS: The Art of Managing Your Supply Chain

CHAPTER 1: War Is Logistics

“Without supplies, no army is brave”

—Frederick II of Prussia, in his Instruction for his Generals, 1747

Military logistics was very much in the forefront of the mind of the Western world at the beginning of the 1990s as the United States, the United Kingdom, and its more than two dozen Coalition partners rampaged to victory in the short, blitzkrieg-like war known as Desert Storm, liberating Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. More than in any previous war, the media, taking their cue from the victorious commanding Coalition general, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, focused on the logistic skills of the winning side. Hitherto this was unknown territory for the modern day press.

TV networks aired clips of the Coalition’s combined formidable might that was deployed in Saudi Arabia, an astounding 670,000 men from 28 nations—while newspapers devoted considerable space to the vast numbers of soldiers, vehicles, and tonnages that were successfully moved to support them. After all, during the methodical six-month buildup prior to combat, Operation Desert Shield, the logistics was all there was to write about.

Most importantly, and impressively, the massive logistic preparations leading up to Desert Storm itself worked. Somehow the 150,000 troops of the U.S. VII and XVII Corps, with all their advanced weapons, ammunition, and supplies were able to secretly move 150 miles across the forbidding Arabian desert; in fact, most of their supplies were actually waiting for the troops when they got there! Simultaneously, the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division rampaged 250 miles across Iraq, with ample no hitch and with ample support. How?

Elementary, Schwarzkopf said, “logistics.”

Both at his famous press conferences as well as later in his memoirs, Stormin’ Norman called Desert Storm a “logistician’s war,” handing much of the credit for the Coalition’s lightning-swift victory to his chief logistician, or quartermaster general, as he would have been called in a previous era, Lieutenant General Gus Pagonis. Pagonis, Schwarzkopf declared, was an “Einstein who could make anything happen,” and, in the Gulf War, did.

Likewise, media pundits from NBC’s John Chancellor on down also attributed the successful result of the war to logistics.

What was that and what did it have to do with war?

Of course, logistics has everything to do with war. Indeed, as demonstrated below, logistics is war, and the art of supply chain management derives directly from military logistics.

This explains why Lieutenant General William G. Pagonis, the logistical wizard behind the Allied success in Operation Desert Storm, was able to readily adapt so many of the strategies and tactics he developed and used to move mountains for the U.S. Army to his subsequent and current position as senior vice president of supply chain management for Sears, Roebuck. Sears, Roebuck hired him directly from the military in 1991.

Fascinatingly, and revealingly, although the wizard has been working in the civilian sector for over a decade, his chief hero continues to be none other than his Greek ancestor, Alexander the Great, who inspired one of Pagonis’ best-remembered logistical innovations, the mobile firebase. As he confirmed in a recent interview, his personal hall of fame also includes such generals as Ulysses Grant and George Patton.

Why? And what do you as a forward-looking, innovative corporate planner or executive have to learn from these past figures? A lot, as you will see.

——

First, get your definitions straight. So, what exactly is logistics?

Definitions differ. In his authoritative book on military logistics, Supplying War, scholar Martin van Creveld defines logistics as “the practical art of moving armies and keeping them supplied.” Jane’s Dictionary of Military Terms describes it as the art of “planning and carrying out the movement and maintenance of forces.” Both definitions are valid.

So is the more comprehensive (and somewhat harder to chew) definition that Pagonis uses in his instructive memoir of the Gulf War, Moving Mountains. According to the former head of the U.S. Army’s22nd Support Command, military logistics equals the “transportation, supply, warehousing, maintenance, procurement, contracting and automation into [sic] a single function that ensures no suboptimization of those areas to allow the overall accomplishment of a particular strategy, objective, or mission.”

Chapter 4, The Soldier is Customer, will zoom in a little closer on Pagonis, who went on to brilliantly manage logistics for Sears, Roebuck and Co. In addition to taking a closer look at Pagonis’ historic achievement in Kuwait, Chapter 4 will also explore the surprisingly close relationship between military and business logistics.

Indeed, as seen from Pagonis’ example, as well as those of the many retired or former military logisticians who have applied their knowledge and skills to business logistics since World War II, business logistics is essentially an offshoot of military logistics. So it behooves you to look at the military side of the logistical coin first, besides the fact that the history and development of military logistics is a fascinating and important story unto itself. For, most popular literature about war notwithstanding, war is not just about tactics and strategy. War is, as the media and general public, not to mention many in the military itself, belatedly gleaned in Kuwait, also, as General Schwarzkopf reminded America, very often about logistics.

Back to definitions. There is another, even more wide-sweeping, nonkhaki definition of logistics than Pagonis’ quite comprehensive one that is also useful and valid in analyzing the broad sweep of military history. Successful military logistics can also mean the ability of the entire nation, or the national infrastructure and manufacturing base to support its armed forces, much as America did during World War II, when American industry hearkened to President Roosevelt’s call for the country to become “the arsenal of democracy.”

In this sense, the greatest logistical hero of World War II was, arguably, a civilian, Henry Kaiser, the West Coast-based shipbuilder and manufacturing wizard who revolutionized the shipbuilding industry. He played a major role in winning the war through his extraordinary employment of mass prefabrication.

As John Keegan, the distinguished military historian, writes in his landmark book, A History of Warfare, “It was America’s industry that overwhelmed its German and Japanese enemies, though only because American shipyards also supplied the transportation to move it.”

Ultimately, more than 51,000,000 tons of merchant shipping was built by United States shipyards between 1941 and 1945, including some 10,000 Liberty and Victory freighters and T2 tankers. Kaiser’s titanic shipyards in California and Oregon were responsible for nearly one third of that output, as well as the most speedily built ships. When Kaiser, whose prior experience was in building dams and highways and was such a landlubber that he called the bow of a ship “the front end,” first responded to the need for more tonnage, partly to replace the millions of tons sunk by Admiral Doenitz’s happily marauding submarines, it took an average of 150 days to build a Liberty ship.

By the end of 1942, Kaiser’s flying troupes of engineers and machinists were able to cut that time down to an astounding four days and fifteen hours and were turning out a ship a day, a rate Kaiser maintained until the end of the war, thus helping to win the crucial “Battle of the Atlantic.” For four years the impetuous builder—whose factories also turned out dozens of innovative and effective light, or jeep carriers was the personification of the arsenal of democracy, and of American logistical can do.

In short, military logistics, especially modern day military logistics, is not just a uniformed matter. General Pagonis may well have been the outstanding logistical hero of the Gulf War—but so were the men and women back home who made the equipment which he and the men and women under him then successfully managed to get to the battlefront itself.

——

However narrowly or broadly one defines the art of military logistics it is hard to underestimate its importance in war. Logistics governs what units a nation’s armed forces can deploy, the phasing of its war plans, as well as the selection of tactical objectives. Without logistics, quite simply, war plans cannot be supplied, hence they cannot be executed.

To be sure, logistics isn’t the whole game in war. As John Keegan, again, notes in A History of Warfare, “logistic supremacy on its own rarely wins a campaign against a determined enemy.” Thus, the Union armies which hapless General George McLellan led in the botched Peninsula Campaign of 1862 were better-supplied than their oft-bedraggled counterparts. However the latter were better led and better motivated—which is why McLellan was replaced later that year.

Fortunately, McLellan’s replacement, Ulysses S. Grant, was a superior leader and tactician, not to mention a superior logistician. Later, after the tide of the Civil War had turned—thanks in part to Grant’s brutal, logistic-minded, “total war” strategy—and the South was even more bedraggled, its forces were still able to put up a formidable fight, and occasionally win battles on the field. However, the South’s utter logistic defeat, the near vitiation of its economy and war arsenal, meant that its total defeat was only a matter of time.

——

What, exactly, makes for a logistically astute and effective military commander?

According to P.D. Foxton, a career British logistics officer, and author of Powering War: Modern Land Force Logistics, the key traditional principles of effective military logistics are: foresight, or the ability to plan and provide for one’s forces’ supply and transport on the battlefield, as well as to counter an opponent’s logistics; flexibility, the ability to adapt logistic plans to dynamic battlefield conditions; economy, the ability to make most economic or efficient, use of available materiel and supplies, including raw material; simplicity, the ability or talent to make logistic plans as simple as possible, and to clearly articulate them; cooperation, the ability to secure the cooperation of one’s allies or hosts in accomplishing the overall mission.

Most of these principles can also be retroactively applied as criteria for evaluating the logistic competence of the great captains or commanders of history.

Unsurprisingly, most, if not all, of the great commanders of military history, have also been great, or at least competent logisticians. They had to be, in order to win.

How consistently they managed their logistics, as you shall also see, is another matter.

Finally, added to the above criteria is one more crucial criterion for measuring logistical competence and greatness: innovation.

As it happens, these are also effective criteria for evaluating the great captains of business, and how well and efficiently they run their logistics.

But first, using these criteria, look back two millennia and take a look at history’s first great captain—some say greatest—Alexander the Great.

——

When, during the tense hours before Operation Desert Shield gave way to Operation Desert Storm, Norman Schwarzkopf, asked his chief logistician upon what doctrine his logistical plan for the pending war was based, Schwarzkopf was somewhat taken aback by Gus Pagonis’ reply. “I got the idea from a fellow Greek,” the general-cum-military history student replied with a straight face “…Alexander the Great.”

Schwarzkopf, no mean student of military history himself, should not have been surprised by Pagonis’ seemingly flip answer.

To be sure, in addition to being history’s first great Captain, Philip II, as he was originally known, was also its first logistician. Before he arrived on the world stage in the 4^th century B.C. and unleashed his merciless phalanxes on his hapless Near Eastern and Asian neighbors, military leaders did not worry unduly about how to supply their small, usually close ranging forces. When necessary, the four legged supply trains attached to prehistoric armies could be supplemented by ad hoc plundering or foraging. Logistics—supply and transport—was not something the average early day commander gave much considered thought.

However, Alexander’s sweeping imperial ambitions put him into a new strategic, and thus logistic league altogether. The brilliant, impetuous, and somewhat mad (though no more than any of the other great megalomaniacs of history) Greek literally wished to conquer the world, and to a remarkable degree possessed the logistical genius to fulfill his grandiose ambitions.

Indeed, as Donald Engels convincingly demonstrates in his 1977 book, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian War—the same monograph that Pagonis cites as his logistical bible—in which Engels describes the massive and sophisticated logistics behind Alexander’s 4,000 mile march from Egypt through Persia to India, the longest in history, logistics was at the heart of both Alexander’s strategy and tactics.

As Engels shows, few commanders in chief have given as much advance thought to their supply and transport problems as did Alexander. For his armies to be successful, he recognized from the start, they had to be as mobile as possible. This meant that they had to be as light as possible. The enormous impedimenta of his predecessors, with their cumbrous trains of wagons, women, and livestock, simply wouldn’t do. Alexander wanted—needed—a long range striking force that was lean and mean. And he got it.

As Frontinius, the Roman military historian, would later write with no little admiration, “When Alexander organized his first army he ordered that no one was to use a wagon. The horsemen he allowed one servant each, but for the infantry he permitted for every ten men one attendant only who was charged with carrying milling equipment and ropes.”

Instead of the useless or hangers on of yore, Alexander’s highly sophisticated army was the first to employ specially trained engineers and quartermasters, in addition to cavalry and infantry. These primeval engineers played a crucial role in Alexander’s early, successful efforts to reduce the fortified cities of Halicarnassus, Tyre, Gaza, and other citadels, as well as his later great marches. His able quartermasters, for their part, would administer the best logistic system of the day, and one that would endure to the 20^th century, inspiring future logisticians right up to Gus Pagonis.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of that system—and the one, as you shall see, that Pagonis was most directly inspired by—was Alexander’s invention and establishment of advance supply depots for his armies, to reinforce them when they got there. To install this advance depot network, Alexander sent his representatives ahead of his troops with instructions to purchase food or forage in exchange for cash or the promise of payment after victory. Troop garrisons were then installed in order to oversee these supply dumps.

These advance provisioners had broad latitude of action. If the leaders or representatives in the territories Alexander intended to traverse and/or conquer and/or do battle on refused to allow such depots to be built, he simply instructed his men to take hostages to ensure that they were. Involuntary cooperation, you might call it. But it worked.

Thus established, these depots enabled Alexander’s sprawling armies to hop from one depot, and one more or less easily annexed territory, to another. The savvy Greek also synchronized his advance with the harvest dates in the conquered, or soon-to-be conquered countries. That’s foresight.

That’s logistics.

Once underway, the economy-minded commander never took supplies for granted, often ordering his men to force march in order to conserve their stores. Effective and vigilant control and command of the supply side of war, Alexander understood—as all the great captains of history have understood—was a prerequisite, if not the prerequisite for command and control of the battlefield itself.

Alexander was also the first military leader to work out the basic math behind supplying a large, expeditionary army. After considerable trial and error, Alexander and his military engineers calculated the effective tactical range of their force as no more than eight days from the point of supply, either by stationary or floating depot.

The distances and dimensions of Alexander’s 4,000 mile march still boggle the mind. Thus, for Alexander’s longest march from his home base, in 326 B.C., between the River Indus and the Markan in Baluchistan, a distance of 300 miles, he and his quartermasters managed to stockpile, by hook or crook, no less than 52,000 tons of provisions, sufficient to supply his sleek army of 87,000 infantry and 52,000 support crew during the four months they successfully operated in the region.

Since an animal train would have consumed its load, and the men eaten their individual allotments of thirty pounds of provisions well before the march was complete, he counted on the accompanying fleet to resupply his men as they marched near the Indian Ocean coast.

In the event—and unfortunately for him—Alexander also counted on the seasonal Asian monsoon to refresh the rivers from which his men would then take water at their estuaries.

However, in this case, Alexander’s carefully thought out plans were undone by the fog of war. That fateful year—326 B.C.—the Asian monsoon blew in a different direction than it normally did. Instead of helping him, the monsoon hindered him, its winds confining his fleet to the mouth of the Indus, while his men died of thirst and starvation. Three quarters of his men were lost.

For all his foresight, Alexander had not been able to secure the cooperation of the gods.

Twenty two hundred years later, in Normandy, an equally unexpected onslaught of monsoon weather created similar havoc with the armies of General Dwight Eisenhower, severing their supply link to England, and depriving forward troops of supplies. There were fewer immediate casualties than in Baluchistan, but the chaos on the beaches, as well as further inland, as Eisenhower’s and Montgomery’s phalanxes ran short of fuel and ammunition, temporarily halting their advance were nearly as fatal to the Allied advance as it was to Alexander’s.

Fortunately, Ike’s clever logisticians were able to improvise their way out of the deadly logjam by jerry-rigging the motorized Red Ball Express and the Allies’ bogged down battlewagon was able to move on.

Alexander’s quartermasters were no less innovative. Unfortunately, they didn’t have trucks. The weather gods won. But that does not take anything away from his manifest genius as a commander, as well as history’s first great logistician.

——

The next great captain—and great logistician—to emerge from the mists of ancient military history was the redoubtable Carthagian general, Hannibal. When the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome broke out in 218 B.C., this brave, bold, and innovative commander decided to take the fight to Italy itself. To do so, he used a novel means of bringing his men and their supplies to the Mediterranean battlefront: the elephant truck.

Braving formidable difficulties and hardships, Hannibal led his army of 60,000 stout hearted men, backed up by 37 no less stout hearted elephants, across the Spanish Pyrenees, whereupon his forces crossed the Rhone River over history’s first pontoon bridges—which had to be strong enough to bear the weight of his baying elephant train—then across and through the Little St. Bernard Pass into Italy, and finally onto three successive victories over the Romans in two years: a remarkable combined feat of arms and logistics.

In addition to being superb carriers of men and materiel, Hannibal’s African-imported elephant fleet also had the welcome psychological side effect of scaring the living bejesus out of the earthbound Roman troops, once they loomed into the sight—although this advantage was sometimes dissipated when the beasts ran amok in the ensuing battle itself.

In the event, Hannibal’s inadequate logistics undid him. His lack of reinforcements or forward supply depots fatally weakened his expeditionary force, and the offensive threat they posed, allowing the Romans to recover from their initial surprise and divert some of their stronger and better supplied forces to attacks upon Carthage itself. In 204 B.C. Hannibal was recalled, and in 202 B.C. he was decisively defeated by the Roman general Scipo Africanus—no mean commander himself—at Zama near his North African home base.

Eventually, under Roman pressure, the Carthaginians banished Hannibal, and the disgraced general fled to Crete. There, the still enraged Romans pursued him, and rather than become their prisoner, he took his own life.

Nonetheless, Hannibal’s amazing, elephant-borne foray through the Alps still stands one of the great masterpieces of logistic planning in military history.

Although it took a century or so for them to get the hang of it, the Romans and their generals certainly recognized the importance of supply and transport issues in creating, governing, and maintaining a great empire. That Julius Caesar was a great leader of men is well known. What is less well known is that he was also, like Alexander and Hannibal before him, a brilliant and able logistician.

“I would prefer to conquer [my foe] by hunger rather than by steel,” Caesar once said. The Roman displayed his logistical acumen during the civil war against Pompeii, in which the cunning Pompeiians assayed the logistic-based strategy of starving out Caesar’s army by firing the adjoining fields—the first known use of scorched earth—and out of its blocking position atop the Ilerda plateau.

However, the Roman general was prepared for such a contingency, having ensured that his men already had plenteous rations before taking the heights. Instead of the Romans, it was the Pompeiians who wound up starving. Counter-logistics, you might call it.

Vegetius, perhaps history’s first military theorist, placed considerable importance on logistics in his writings, urging, in one of his influential tracts, that “young soldiers must be given frequent practice in carrying loads of up to 60 pounds and marching along at the military pace, for on strenuous campaigns they will be faced with the necessity of carrying their rations as well as their arms.”

After subsequent tests, the logistically minded Romans revised that figure somewhat, concluding that the maximum optimal load for an individual infantrymen, or legion, was actually a little more, 70 pounds, with half taken up by arms, clothing, and equipment, and the other half by food. If rations were consumed at the rate of three pounds a day, the army could march for 10 to 12 days before having to refit at one of the capacious supply depots which the Roman Senate wisely had installed every 16 miles.

Ultimately, of course, beyond the considerable impact and influence of either Caesar’s generalship or Vegetius’ writings on Rome’s military fortunes, Rome’s might was based squarely on its army itself, the world’s first elite fighting force, whose superior discipline and weapons were the envy of their adversaries. Legions tended to be loyal to their own generals and this support gave popular generals such as Caesar their real power. Power flowed from the bottom up.

Besides their outstanding discipline and esprit de corps, and weapons, the Roman army had something else their enemies were jealous of, and that was crucial to maintaining Rome’s power: its far reaching, 10,000 mile network of chariot-tested tough concrete roads. As one knowledgeable observer writes, “it was Rome’s roads that made the legions who built them so effective an instrument of imperial power.”

It was these, history’s first highways, which enabled Roman commanders to calculate precise marching times between military storehouses and barracks, and between the outposts of its far flung empire. Thus, for example, they knew, because of their roads, that the march from Rome to Brindisi, in order, to say, quell unrest there, took precisely 15 days, while a march on Antioch, at the aforementioned rates of marching and food consumption, would take no less—and no more—than 124.

This was the working calculus behind the Roman Empire.

That was logistics.

By the same token, once Rome’s magnificent roads were allowed to decay, strategic planning was no longer possible. Nor was Rome.

Of course, hubris had something to do with the inevitable decline of the Roman empire.

But so did logistics.

——

As other military historians have noted, the eight hundred or so years between the demise of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance did little to advance the art of war, nor the art of military logistics. Nor were there any great Western captains to speak of, with the possible exception of Charlemagne.

This lack of enlightened military leadership, and of systematic logistics, was especially evident in the numerous Crusades of the early centuries of the second millennium. The ill-led, ill-supported Crusaders of the 11^th and 12^th centuries who tried to wrest control of Palestine from the Saracens and their Muslim brothers were often undermined and demoralized by their logistical incompetence. Faith alone, the crusaders found was not sufficient to sustain them during the successive thousand-mile military expeditions to the Holy Land.

If the Crusaders failed to appreciate the back, or logistical, side of the battlefield, their less starry-eyed enemies, especially the cunning Turks, did. In the first successful use of scorched earth, the Turks effectively stymied the third crusade, in 1078, by driving cattle off the Crusaders’ route as well as burning grass and even whole villages. Unfortunately for the hapless Christians, their otherwise fearless leader, Peter the Hermit, was no Caesar, who had earlier outwitted the Pompeiians when they had tried this gambit.

The gambit worked. The hungry crusaders became a disorganized rabble. End of crusade.

Logistics, or, rather, the failure to give proper importance to logistics, in this case the need for paying for sealift ability, directly influenced the course of the next, fourth crusade in 1096. Unable to pay the money-minded Venetians for their shipping, the rambunctious crusaders were persuaded by their leaders to sack the Christian city of Constantinople, which did little to endear them to the local populace.

——

Meanwhile, from out of the East that redoubtable savage, and formidable commander, Genghis Khan had appeared with his Mongolian hordes to rape, pillage, and conquer.

At first blush, one would think that Genghis Khan would be the last one to give considered thought to logistical matters.

Actually, quite the opposite. Seen with the cold eye of history, Khan was not only a brilliant tactician, cleverly separating his horsemen into tight columns before simultaneously converging on the hapless enemy from various directions; he was also a very able and resourceful logistician.

Ever keeping the logistical bottom-line in mind, Khan instilled in his horsemen the importance of living frugally, as well as moving frugally.

To help assure the latter, the great Mongol had his mounted berserkers travel with three horses, one as primary mount, one to draw milk from, and a spare, which could also be eaten if necessary: logistics in motion.

Indeed, at least one historian has called Khan “the ultimate logistician, insofar as he pursued a deliberate strategy of killing civilians who were potential soldiers, as well as [my italics] producers”—in short, literally decimating the opposing national arsenal at its source.

The less bodies an adversary had, the less of an army he could raise, no less support.

Crude, but, as Khan’s successes against the various 12^th century Western armies—and peoples—armies who had the misfortune of falling under his ruthless gaze, it worked.

In that light, the great Mongolian also deserves his own, searing place in the military logistical hall of fame.

In his own memorable way, Khan had schematized his supply chain and managed it in an expeditious, if brutal way. In a way, you could say, Khan did have a Tri-Level view.

He just lacked humanity.

Then again, isn’t the same true of many contemporary CEOs?

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Damon Schechter with
Gordon Sander, New York: John Wiley & Sons
Available November 2002
$29.95 US / Cloth / 272 pp
ISBN: 0-4712-1114-1