Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

U.S. Department of
Defense Profile:
Making the Tail Smaller
and the Tooth Stronger
As the U.S. military enters the 21st century, the Department of Defense is
recrafting its approach to warfare. It’s creating a new blueprint called the
Forward-centric Logistics Enterprise (FLE) which will take the best practices
of business and integrate them with the best practices of the military,
creating a more vital partnership than ever for more agile supply chain
performance.
“There is no parallel in commercial industry for what we do today. If we
were a private enterprise, we would be number 1 on the Fortune Global
500,” noted Diane K. Morales, U.S. deputy under secretary of defense for
logistics and materiel readiness, at the time of our interview. She was
responding to a question about the scope of the largest supply chain in the
world—that of the U.S. Department of Defense. At our request, she continued
with the stats: “Our dollar volume of business is more than double that
of Wal-Mart, which is currently number 1 on the global Fortune list. Our
supply chains cost nearly $80 billion a year to operate. We employ over 1
million people and deliver more than $400 billion in value to our customers.
“Every U.S. soldier, sailor, aviator, and Marine is a customer, and every
American citizen is a stockholder. We have an active and vocal 535-member
board of directors [the House and the Senate]. And we’re number 1 in our
marketplace—the dominant market position that our stockholders demand.”
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