Anticipation: First Among Equals

By Lt. Gen. Duane A. GambleOctober 21, 2020

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Integration, anticipation, responsiveness, simplicity, economy, survivability, continuity, and improvisation: the eight Principles of Sustainment. These foundational tenets guide sustainment professionals at all echelons. They are the framework for running command and staff elements. When artfully applied, they allow us to maintain freedom of action, enable strategic and operational reach, and provide our Army the endurance required for operations across the spectrum of conflict. Eight total, but one stands above all: anticipation.

For over half a year, the world has been pitted against the unseen enemy of COVID-19. As I contemplate the Army’s response to COVID-19, I also consider how our Army and our nation responded to the last time the strategic support area (SSA) was contested: the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed my great-grandfather.

While all eight principles are critical and meant to work in concert, I believe anticipation is the first among equals. Just as anticipation is decisive to sustaining a tactical formation in the tactical support area, it is the key to sustaining training, distribution, and deployment in the SSA during contested operations. As I discussed in recent editions, our ability to operate with freedom of action in the SSA is no longer guaranteed. Gone are the days when the U.S. could rely on the geographic protection the Atlantic and Pacific oceans provided. We must anticipate adversarial attempts to hamstring our readiness, distribution, and deployment operations and act in anticipatory ways to eliminate vulnerabilities in order to leverage our Army’s greatest strength: the ability to project and sustain forces across strategic distances in support of Combatant Commanders’ requirements. Anticipation is critical at all echelons, from tactical to strategic. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, anticipatory action postured the Army to provide endurance and freedom of action in SSA operations. Only anticipation increases the number of options available to commanders and provides the time necessary to develop courses of action, and then to decide, rehearse, and execute.

Our nation, the international community, and our Army are months into fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Army closely watched the outbreak in China and in January set up the first planning team to prepare for the arrival of the virus at our bases and on our shores. The sustainment and medical logistics teams here in the Pentagon, in addition to our enterprise and industry partners, anticipated Army requirements and postured our Army for COVID-19. Since then, we have consistently and continuously kept the pipeline of critical resources open, resulting in a sustained and ready Army. OSD and the Joint Staff tasked us to support other Services who did not anticipate or posture as well as our Army. While still reacting to contact, we created a Medical Logistics (MEDLOG) Division within the G-4 to deliver running command and staff estimates for the PPE and testing supplies, to shape and execute Army MEDLOG policy, and to unify the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution for MEDLOG in support of COVID-19. These changes are a strong start but we must now further our understanding of the operating environment, as well as the impacts of a pandemic on our global and integrated supply chain while we continue to anticipate future requirements.

The influenza pandemic of 1918 that struck our nation came in multiple waves. Foresight and the ability of leaders to make adjustments in procedures and policy, pre-position required medical equipment at key locations and adapt minimized risk of successive outbreaks. As we prepare for potential successive COVID-19 outbreaks, the logistics enterprise continues to anticipate requirements for the SSA, preparing the Army to fight and win in this contested environment. Early in the COVID fight, we anticipated future requirements and established provisional contingency stocks of critical Class VIII Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to safeguard our medical professionals, our Soldiers, Civilians and their loved ones at home. We partnered with The Office of the Surgeon General and the Joint Staff to right-size Pandemic Response Contingency Stocks. We redesigned unit deployment packages and Army Prepositioned Stock (APS) sets for medical units with additional PPE to enhance readiness. We also ordered, and have now prepared, contingency stocks if we have to fight large scale ground combat operations in a pandemic environment. This sounds utterly logical, but no one except the Army was thinking about this unstated and unforecasted requirement in March 2020. Army logisticians must continue to anticipate emerging requirements and optimize our support against any known or unknown mission set.

As sustainment professionals, we must continually search for and identify ways to rapidly project combat power and sustain our forces across the globe. This includes modernizing our deployment infrastructure; continuing to re-evaluate APS sets positioning and ensuring munitions are postured to effectively meet the Combatant Commanders’ operational requirements. History has shown we must be capable of executing this under extremely difficult conditions. The U.S. Army maintained the capability to mobilize millions of Soldiers, pieces of equipment, supplies and munitions to Europe during the 1918 pandemic and today we continue to anticipate requirements that will enable us to sustain operations in a COVID-19 environment. To that end, we’ve developed an Army common operating picture for Class VIII PPE and COVID testing supplies that includes both Medical Treatment Facilities (MTFs) and the operational force’s field hospitals and aid stations. Working closely with our industry and strategic partners, we are also creating redundancy in the Class VIII supply chain to mitigate against the global competition for PPE, disrupted distribution capacity and overwhelmed manufacturing. Our ability to continually evaluate our environment and anticipate future requirements will be the key to the Army’s continued success whether at tactical echelons or in the SSA, particularly when the freedom of action we as an Army have always enjoyed here in the United States is contested.

Finally, I look back at how the Army operated during World War I when the environment was contested. In New Jersey, Camp Merritt was established as a staging base to mobilize Soldiers preparing to embark on troop transport ships bound for Europe. Nearly 500,000 Soldiers deployed overseas from the camp during the height of the influenza pandemic as part of the American Expeditionary Forces. In 1924, The Camp Merritt Memorial Monument was dedicated to honor those Soldiers that passed through the camp, as well as the 578 Soldiers who died at the camp from the influenza of 1918. The monument remains as a solemn reminder that we must continually strive to anticipate requirements to support operations in the strategic support area in a contested environment.

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Lt. Gen. Duane A. Gamble, Deputy Chief of Staff, Headquarters, Department of the Army, G-4, oversees policies and procedures used by U.S. Army Logisticians. He has masters of science degrees from Florida Institute of Technology, and Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

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This article was published in the October-December 2020 issue of Army Sustainment.

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