Imagine an operational environment in the near future. Inside a main command post, a decision is made quickly but agonizingly. Over a radio net and the Maven Smart System, the division commander receives two competing reports. First, a maneuver brigade task force, en route to the final line of objective to set conditions for the end state, moves toward terrain under enemy counterbattery fire. Second, the division support area (DSA), buried in a thicket of trees and hastily fortified, is receiving coordinated fires from an enemy artillery group to the northeast. Both elements are exposed. Both are essential. But only one can be covered by the division’s limited counterfire and protection resources.
The commander makes his decision. “Support the maneuver,” he says without hesitation. “Tell the division sustainment brigade to displace.”
Reviewing military history, this is not a new kind of choice. It is a familiar scenario, often framed as prioritizing the offense over the support. The forward over the rear. But what if that dichotomy is wrong? In his monograph Bringing Order to Chaos: Historical Case Studies of Combined Arms Maneuver in Large-Scale Combat Operations, retired LTC Dr. Peter J. Schifferle warns that the wars of the future will be waged not just with firepower but with a mindset accustomed to uncertainty. He urges leaders to embrace unpredictability rather than recoil from it. Yet, within the realm of sustainment, chaos is not merely a condition to be managed but a weapon to be wielded. For too long, military logistics has adhered to a defensive paradigm. It is a system of predictability, cycles, and vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited by the enemy. But what if sustainment forces could do more than endure the enemy’s disruptions? What if they could turn logistics into an offensive capability, one that disrupts, disintegrates, defeats, or isolates the enemy’s sustainment networks before they ever become a threat? What if the support is the offense? What if the sustainment force is not just the enabler, but the disrupter?
As the Army reorients toward large-scale combat operations against peer threats, the division sustainment brigade (DSB) cannot remain tethered to a defensive mindset. Survivability alone will not preserve freedom of action. Sustainment formations must be weaponized and capable of shaping, deceiving, fixing, and even striking. In short, the Army must sustain in contact through offensive logistics.
The Problem with Survival as Strategy (A Negative Goal)
DSAs, designed as mobile sustainment hubs, have traditionally relocated to avoid detection and maintain responsiveness. However, in today’s environment of persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), long-range precision fires, and electronic warfare (an imperative of operations), mere movement is no longer a shield.
The problem is not just the enemy’s reach, but our predictability. Sustainment operations, including convoy schedules, fuel cycles, and ammunition drops, often follow set rhythms and rely on fixed nodes. This predictability becomes a vulnerability, exposing logistics units to preemptive targeting. Proof of this lies in much analysis of the Institute for the Study of War’s Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, which shows that Ukraine continues to target sustainment nodes to great effect.
As Clausewitz noted, defense may be stronger, but only offense imposes will. The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) reminds practitioners that if the enemy can observe and anticipate our actions, then they can act faster, seizing the initiative. Thus, logistics must evolve. To merely endure is to fall behind. The future of sustainment lies not in reactive defense, but in disrupting the adversary’s capacity to threaten logistics forces at all.
Offensive Logistics: A New Paradigm (A Positive Goal)
Offensive logistics is not a break from doctrine, it is a transformation. It reframes logistics as more than a supporting effort, and it becomes a means to impose operational pressure and disrupt the enemy’s ability to fight. By weaponizing sustainment, commanders gain a new lever of influence.
At its core, offensive logistics targets the enemy’s ability to maneuver, sense, and sustain. Field artillery units, for example, rely on predictable patterns of resupply, recovery, and displacement. These dependencies become exploitable vulnerabilities that a sustainment unit can attack. Rather than simply defending friendly logistics nodes, sustainment forces can exploit the enemy’s logistics nodes.
This new philosophy is defined by four core functions:
- Disrupt enemy supply lines before they reach the fight.
- Disintegrate sustainment cohesion through deception, interdiction, and precision strikes.
- Defeat logistics capabilities by rendering supply nodes and convoys untenable.
- Isolate combat forces by cutting them off from fuel, ammunition, and reinforcement.
History offers powerful reminders of this type of practice. GEN Sherman’s March to the Sea devastated Confederate logistics, accelerating the collapse of resistance. In Desert Storm, the targeting of retreating Iraqi forces on the Highway of Death severed their sustainment lifelines. In both cases, logistics was not just an enabler of combat, it was offensive and decisive.
Applying Offensive Logistics
While not a maneuver unit in the traditional sense, the DSB possesses mobility, contracting, intelligence, engineering, fabrication, and data capabilities that can be directed offensively. Offensive logistics during a Transformation in Contact (TiC) 2.0 environment requires a fundamental shift in how sustainment forces are employed. It must be less predictable, more mobile, and deeply integrated into operational planning. Sustainment must move beyond support to become a shaping force on the battlefield. That means embedding logistics planners in targeting cells, integrating cyber and AI tools to reduce predictability, and enabling sustainment formations to execute deception, interdiction, and precision disruption against enemy logistics. This is not just a refinement of doctrine, it is a convergence of maneuver and sustainment into a unified, offensive-minded strategy.
The DSB is uniquely positioned to operationalize this shift. By employing logistics deception nodes that mimic DSAs, the DSB can fix enemy fires into kill zones. Through counter-logistics raids, sustainment assets can exploit gaps and directly deny enemy forces the ability to rearm or refuel. Predictive targeting, driven by logistics data trends, can identify enemy resupply actions before they happen, cueing division fires to interdict convoys in motion. Recovery ambushes and terrain denial operations use classic sustainment tasks like recovery, fabrication, and mobility as offensive tools. Even cyber integration allows logisticians to disrupt enemy sustainment digitally, injecting confusion and friction into their operations. Together, these actions redefine logistics not as a passive necessity, but as an active instrument of operational advantage.
In a fictional operational environment, a DSB can starve a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) battalion by targeting its Class V (rocket) resupply. Instead of pursuing mobile launchers, sustainment planners analyze firing patterns to predict resupply windows and routes. Forward positioned maintenance recovery teams deploy ISR sensors disguised as maintenance assets near enemy ammunition supply points (ASPs). Engineers crater key main supply routes while decoy convoys and dummy ASPs distort enemy logistics routing. Sustainment informed target decks, fed to the division targeting cell, prioritize reload vehicles and mobile ammo handling sites over launchers. Simultaneously, electromagnetic spectrum teams jam logistics command and control nets, isolating the HIMARS from its supply nodes. Deprived of rockets, the battalion becomes inert. Offensive logistics turns sustainment into a weapon that deceives, disrupts, and denies the enemy, while friendly convoys maneuver freely, delivering multiclass resupply to American forces.
Creating the Offensive Logistics Cell
To fully operationalize offensive logistics, DSBs must establish a dedicated offensive logistics cell within the support operations (SPO) section. This cell synchronizes planning, targeting, deception, and sustainment capabilities to support the division’s shaping and maneuver operations. Composed of a mobility officer or warrant officer, an S-2 planner focused on enemy sustainment, allied trades and fabrication leads, a cyber or signal liaison, a deception planner, an engineer officer, and a fires integration officer linked to division G-3 and fires, the offensive logistics cell transforms sustainment from a support role into a combat multiplier. Its mission is to weaponize sustainment operations. This is not about moving beans and bullets faster, it is about using them to create dilemmas for the enemy.
The Future of Offensive Logistics
Future combat, whether in the European, Pacific, African, or Middle Eastern theaters, demands more than survivability, it demands initiative. For too long, defensive logistics has defined our posture. Sustainment nodes are too big and predictable to rely on maneuver units for protection, especially during dynamic task organizations. The future belongs to sustainment forces that impose friction, disrupt enemy timelines, and shape the operational environment. Offensive logistics is that future. Army leaders must recognize that logistics is not just a back-end function, and that it can also be a forward leaning tool of influence. Sustainment formations must be agile, unpredictable, and ready to act offensively. Adaptability must replace predictability. With this new paradigm, this logistics transformation does not just support the fight, it helps win it.
Conclusion: Bringing Sustainment to the Chaos
The fictional division commander is not wrong to prioritize maneuver, but in future combat, that decision must no longer come at the expense of the DSB. A sustainment force postured for offense does not just survive, it helps eliminate the threat. This is the transformation demanded by the TiC 2.0 initiative. With new technologies, Army structure changes, and a mindset that adapts to the operational environment, sustainment operations can lead to an end state congruent with the theater’s strategy. This is not a call to abandon doctrine, but to transform it to wield logistics not just as support, but as strategy.
Offensive logistics reframes the sustainer as a combat enabler and combatant. Through deception nodes, predictive targeting, recovery ambushes, and cyber-logistics integration, sustainment becomes a second front. Operations that dislocate, disintegrate, defeat, and isolate. A dedicated offensive logistics cell, embedded within SPO, makes this possible. This team ensures logistics is no longer an afterthought in targeting but a source of targets.
As Dr. Schifferle writes, “Our mindset, our values, and our culture on training, education, and unit readiness must continue to adapt to the changing operational environment.” That is why offensive logistics is an idea worth considering. It targets the systems that hold the enemy together. It changes the operational environment in our favor by doing so, and it gives sustainment commanders something they rarely possess, initiative in offensive operations.
In this new paradigm, sustainment does more than keep the fight going. Sustainment shapes, deceives, denies, and wins. Victory will not go to the side that moves the most, it will go to the side that starves the other of the chance to fight at all.
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MAJ Anthony Grajales currently serves as the 87th Division Sustainment Support Battalion support operations officer in the 3rd Division Sustainment Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, at Fort Stewart, Georgia. A graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff Officer College and School of Advanced Military Studies, he holds a Master of Science degree from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. A logistics officer, he has served in various positions within the XVIII Airborne Corps.
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This article was published in the summer 2025 issue of Army Sustainment.
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