Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

170 Strategic Supply Chain Management
We get the picture. Yet, although mighty indeed, the U.S. Department
of Defense’s (DoD’s) supply chain apparatus is facing a transformation
on a scale never before attempted. Morales’s invocation of Wal-Mart
($246.5 billion in annual sales) is appropriate. Besides shoelaces and toothbrushes,
frying pans and motor oil, though, the DoD has to supply missile
subassemblies, vehicle engines and transmissions, microcircuits, x-ray
machines and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment, aircraft
frames, heavy industrial machinery, and jet fuel, to name a few of the
4.6 million items stocked by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). Every
SKU must be delivered on time—no stock-outs, no rainchecks—in whatever
quantities the customer requires, wherever the customer happens to be
in the world at any particular moment.
That “customer,” as we all know, is what the military calls a
“warfighter.” And he or she is liable to be anywhere, anytime these days. As
Morales notes, the pace and modus operandi of warfighting have changed
considerably even over the past decade. “In 1991, in Desert Storm, General
Norman Schwarzkopf wanted 60 days of supplies on hand before he would
launch an assault with a quarter million troops. In Operation Iraqi Freedom
(OIF), General Tommy Franks wanted just two weeks’ worth of supplies for
150,000 troops.”
WHEN PUSH COMES TO PULL
Morales has spearheaded one of the biggest transformation programs ever
launched at the DoD. It was called the Future Logistics Enterprise during
its policy-planning phase and was renamed the Force-centric Logistics
Enterprise (FLE) during the implementation phase. She describes the program
as “an integrated plan to transform logistics to a more flexible force
to meet the requirements for agility and responsiveness.” The characteristics
of this vision for a modernized logistics capability are fivefold:
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Speed. General Tommy Franks’s battle plan called for a lightning
advance on Baghdad, for instance. Never before has an army
advanced so far so fast: The army covered more than 300 miles
in 22 days.
Flexibility. When Turkey balked at supporting a second front from
the north in Iraq, the United States advanced successfully, solely
from the south, changing its strategy in a matter of hours.
Precision weaponry. In the Gulf War, 8 percent of weapons used
were precision-guided. In OIF, that figure was 66 percent.