The Army is typically the Air Force's largest customer. When the Army speaks, the Air Force listens. We Air Force personnel read "Army Sustainment" and weekly lessons learned from the Center for Army Lessons Learned. Cargo planes are built, fighter tactics are developed, and members of Congress are influenced based on the needs of the Army customer.
Dr. Chris Paparone's article "Logistics Misconstrued," from the January-February 2013 issue of "Army Sustainment," asserts that the emphasis on "sustainment" in joint and service doctrine detracts from logistics to a point of concern. Viewing the article through my Air Force airlift planning lens, I disagree. Rather, I am both excited and confident in the way ahead signaled by the proper and increased use of the term "distribution." This use confirms the expeditionary mindset of theater logistics and force projection as foreseen by the Joint Deployment and Distribution Enterprise, the joint logistics environment, and the vision established in the Joint Logistics Compass.
As I look to the future and know that the United States will have to deal with area denial and access denial and fight from intermediate staging bases outside the joint operations area, I am sure that logistics and distribution doctrine are on sound footing and we are prepared to execute various missions in our nation's interest. I feel that "sustainment" adequately recognizes the Army and Air Force's collaboration with the Defense Logistics Agency and other national logistics partners without returning us to a post-Cold War "garrison force" or "supply" mentality that includes a large footprint, large order quantities, and large warehouses.
Deployment, distribution, and sustainment together enable the essential elements of unified combat operations: effective mission command and effective presentation of forces to the joint force commander. Our largest threat to efficient and effective logistics is not logistics erosion from the term sustainment but, instead, the complacency developed over the past 20 years. This complacency happened because joint force commanders and land component commanders were never limited by logistics across the entire range of military operations.
As resources become constrained, we need to invest in "robust white cells" for our major exercises and make sure that scenarios and exercise planners do not "fairy dust" sustainment and distribution. Thank you for the opportunity to share my two cents.
--Stephen Lenzi,
Air Mobility Operations Instructor,
Air Mobility Command
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This letter was published in the May-June 2013 issue of Army Sustainment magazine.
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