On short notice, the Army sent an armored brigade combat team to Germany using this prepositioned equipment. This meant soldiers could fly out on short notice and fall in on their equipment without having to wait for it to arrive by boat. Within a week of getting orders, soldiers were driving tanks on test ranges, the Army chief of staff Gen. James McConville said recently.
The war in Ukraine is also another reminder of “the importance of complex logistics in large-scale combat,” according to the chief.
Put simply: “If you don’t have logistics, if you don’t have gas, if you don’t have parts, if you don’t have all the ammunition, then those weapon systems become paperweights,” Gen. McConville said.
Or, worse, sitting ducks.
While Army leaders have been opening more prepositioned weapons stock locations in Europe in recent years, the same must now be done in the Indo-Pacific region — and quickly. While logistics enables the sustainment of forces for longer periods, consistent funding is important to build up supply lines and caches in Asia.
“Holding back this year might cost you for the next three,” Curt Higdon, chief of the War Plans and Strategy Division at Army Materiel Command, told Inside Defense. Negotiating access to sites and then building warehouses takes careful planning and long lead times.
However, the investment more than pays for itself. Prepositioned stocks serve not only as a useful deterrent but also “one of the most important things that we have in the competition phase because it allows people to see what we can do.”
Congress requested an update in its recent defense policy bill on posture, infrastructure requirements, prepositioned stocks, and munitions inventories in Europe. All the services should use this opportunity to bolster support for the important but unsexy strategic mobility triad that enables the armed forces to project power around the world.
This article was originally published on the American Enterprise Institute website. It is republished with AEI’s permission.
