Wartime Roles and Capabilities for the Unified Logistic Staffs

This report summarizes the interactions in wartime between the commander-in-chief's (CINC's) logistic staff and (1) the CINC's operations planning staff and (2) the Services' theater components' logistic staffs. It identifies and describes four important roles that, because of limitations in information and authority, CINC logistic staffs can fill only partially today: (1) monitoring current and evolving theater logistic capabilities, (2) coordinating logistic support with current and planned operations, (3) advising the CINC about the supportability of proposed operations and courses of action, and (4) acting as the agent/advocate to non-theater logistic organizations. The authors recommend that these roles be spelled out clearly — along with the constituent decisionmaking and necessary supporting information — in command and organizational documents. They recommend specific technical improvements in decision support for three major types of support resources: bulk fuels, conventional ammunition, and spare parts. They also recommend (1) a review of the unified commands' capabilities to exert wartime command and control over their distribution systems and (2) development of a way of integrating wartime assessments for individual resource categories into evaluations of the overall supportability of specified operations.