Recently, I have done a lot of thinking and reflecting on the war in Ukraine. As the war moves into its fourth year, it is important for us to ask ourselves tough questions about how we can better prepare our Army for future conflicts, not just in Europe but globally. The Russia-Ukraine War serves as a powerful reminder that we must be diligently committed to strengthening the global industrial base. Likewise, we must ensure we are truly an expeditionary Army capable of projecting anywhere in the world at a time of our choosing. Finally, we must have the cooperation and mutual respect of our allies and partners, and a clear and synchronized strategy with them across the globe.
Maintaining international security and military readiness is a cooperative and global endeavor.
A Global, Expeditionary Industrial Base
America’s industrial base enables us to leverage support for Ukraine. Over the last three years, we have seen a renewed investment in both the organic industrial base (OIB) and the larger defense industrial base not seen in decades. Certainly, the shoring up of our arsenals, depots, ammunition plants, and manufacturing capacity across the U.S. is critical to our success in any future conflict. However, I submit that we must think about the industrial base globally. Gone are the days where we can simply move every item back to a depot in the U.S. for repair, because we will be contested.
We must be able to leverage the robust capability of the aforementioned arsenals and depots on a global scale at the point of need. Over the last three years, we have seen inventive ways to accomplish this.
We have seen an explosion of tele-maintenance operations that bring the expert (often in the U.S.) to the mechanic (often only a few kilometers behind the front lines), which has allowed repair of forward equipment and rapid return to the battlefield. We have modernized this maintenance method, which has existed for decades, to leverage modern tools (e.g., chat rooms, video recording/streaming, real-time language translation, etc.).
More recently, we have watched Army Materiel Command (AMC) force project maintainers and subject matter experts from the OIB to deploy forward to unit motor pools across the globe to perform depot-level repairs on site, thus eliminating the need to evacuate the equipment and returning readiness to the unit. While we cannot do this for every piece of equipment, we must continue leveraging this exquisite capability to our advantage. We should also explore opportunities with our defense industry partners to forward project their capabilities to achieve the same benefit.
Force Projection While Globally Contested
In last year’s contested logistics-focused issue, we posited that contested logistics is already impacting our Army, even though we are not fighting a large-scale combat operation (LSCO). One need only look at our military aid to Ukraine to see this phenomenon in action. Of the more than $65 billion in equipment that the U.S. has provided over the last three years, nearly all required swift transportation to Europe to get into the fight quickly. Through the hard work of Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command and U.S. Transportation Command, we moved a staggering amount of equipment in support of Ukraine while also reassuring our allies throughout the world. Thankfully, no adversary has kinetically contested these moves.
However, have no doubt that our adversaries seek to contest us in non-kinetic ways across multiple domains to disrupt this vital flow of equipment, even while we are in a period of strategic competition. Now, take a moment and imagine an LSCO environment where we must force-project the Army from the continental U.S. We must expect that we will also be contested through multiple domains in these operations. The lessons learned while supporting Ukraine serve as a model we must study as we prepare ourselves for LSCO operations. Notably, we must recognize that the homeland will not be a sanctuary, and we will be contested at every step of the way.
We must build resilience into our force projection plans to overcome this fact.
Interoperability and Interchangeability with Allies and Partners
In the three years since Russia invaded Ukraine, nearly 60 countries have provided military aid to Ukraine. While nearly half of this equipment has come from NATO countries, where we spent decades during the Cold War moving toward interoperability, the Armed Forces of Ukraine have received a myriad of equipment with different maintenance and repair parts requirements. Additionally, as we renewed our NATO commitments, we relearned the importance of interoperability with our partners and allies. This is a lesson we must not take lightly. After all, the U.S. has partnered with allies in most conflicts over the last 250 years.
We achieve interoperability through exercises and training with our partners and allies. The scores of multinational exercises that we participate in globally are excellent opportunities to work with our allies to determine whether we can function together.
Importantly, we cannot forget about the sustainment warfighting function when we conduct these events. A nation that thinks of logistics strictly as a national responsibility misses the opportunity to leverage relationships globally that enhance its logistics capabilities. I challenge you to continue to conduct sustainment operations with our allies, and do not be afraid to try new ways of doing business. Through training, we learn how to become more interchangeable.
We must also think about the roads, rails, and ports that will allow us to operate in a theater of operation. I encourage you to look at these not only through our current lens, but to also view them in terms of what might be. One only need look at the European Deterrence Initiative to see how millions of dollars of investments in infrastructure have led to a more capable theater. The U.S. and our allies simply could not have sustained NATO and provided military aid to Ukraine if we had not begun investing in renewing Europe’s infrastructure in 2014 shortly after Russia invaded Crimea.
Last year, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, the Honorable William A. LaPlante, signed the Regional Sustainment Framework (RSF), focused on increasing our maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) interchangeability with our allies and partners. The RSF seeks to “establish a distributed MRO ecosystem that remains viable in peacetime and meets surge requirements during crises and conflicts.” The Army’s initial RSF endeavor supports Army watercraft maintenance operations and leverages the ship repair capabilities of our allies. RSF is essentially a more robust, national-level fix-it-forward concept.
In fact, the Army recently completed the first ever on-condition cyclic maintenance (OCCM) operation on a logistics support vessel (LSV) in the western Pacific. Historically, the Army has conducted LSV OCCM at U.S. West Coast repair facilities. However, using the Republic of Korea’s robust shipbuilding and repair capacity, AMC completed all the LSV’s maintenance requirements ahead of schedule and on budget. Moreover, conducting maintenance in Korea saved nearly 40 sailing days to the U.S. West Coast, which kept the LSV available for operations. One might think of our RSF effort as another way to make the industrial base more expeditionary.
As we move through our 250th year, it is important that we reflect on our past as an Army. As we think back on our history, we must juxtapose it with our contemporary operating environment. Certainly, the technology and capabilities of our Army have changed and grown throughout our history. However, the Army’s story is replete with examples of operating with our allies, leveraging the robust capability of our industrial base, and ensuring we can force-project anywhere in the world. Determining how we will operate in LSCO where the very character of war is changing will ensure that Soldiers have access to the critical sustainment resources necessary to achieve operational superiority in multi-domain operations, regardless of the theater or the austerity of the environment.
This We’ll Defend!
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LTG Heidi J. Hoyle currently serves as Headquarters, Department of the Army, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-4, and oversees policies and procedures used by Army logisticians. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, she has a Master of Science degree in systems engineering from the University of Virginia and a Master of Science degree in national resource strategy from the National Defense University. She is a graduate of the Chemical Officer Basic Course, Combined Logistics Officer Advanced Course, United States Army Command and General Staff College, and the Eisenhower School of National Security and Resource Strategy.
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This article was published in the spring 2025 issue of Army Sustainment.
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