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the enduring naval logistics lessons of world war II and korea
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of Japan. The problem there was how to sustain the level of resupply to their carriers
in order to cope with the huge increase in consumption of aviation fuel and ordnance
caused by the high sortie rate of their jet aircraft. With such jets consuming fuel four
times faster than piston-engined aircraft, and able to carry much heavier payloads,
both fuel and ammunition expenditure rates were to skyrocket. Despite the respective
sizes of US Navy forces between 1945 and the Korean War, in the first ten months of
the Korean War the US naval and marine aircraft expended one fourth as much aircraft
ammunition as that of all US marine and naval ships or shore based aircraft combined
from all theatres in World War II. 4 The result was that replenishment at sea increased
from every third day in a 21 day cycle in the early part of the war to, by the end of the
war, every evolution taking anything up to nine hours despite additional rig stations,
with nightly replenishment eventually becoming the rule. 5
HMAS Sydney (III) and USS Hanna replenishing at sea off the Korean coast.
By the end of the Korean War naval logistics could sustain carriers and their aircraft at
a high tempo, for extended periods at a great distance from their support base (RAN)
Mobile Logistic Support: The Doctrinal Legacy of World War II
and Korea
Progress post-World War II in refining logistics policy based on wartime experience was
erratic, partly because in terms of naval priorities during a time of severe fiscal restraint,
any improvements in underway replenishment capability were evolutionary in nature
and peripheral in consequence. What was here to stay, though, was the concept of
deploying fleet trains specifically for the purpose of sustaining at sea carrier strike
task forces so that they could act as independently as possible from their permanent
bases anywhere in the world, which would indeed soon become the central tenet of
American naval doctrine going forward. Even for the Americans, however, who had