Strategic Supply Chain Management - Supply Chain Online

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE PROFILE: Making the Tail Smaller and the Tooth Stronger 179
where you have everything from combat equipment like tanks and helicopters
to consumables all stashed in places other than the United States, a
sizable portion of them on ships in different oceans of the world—allowed
more rapid reaction and less reliance on airlift and sealift to get materiel to
a distant location. All of that paid off dramatically.”
Much of the afloat prepositioning Boyanton is talking about uses
specially commissioned 900-foot-long medium-speed ships with large
roll-on, roll-off ramps to more efficiently load and unload the military’s
wheeled and tracked equipment. These ships, crewed by civilian merchant
mariners, were procured by DoD after Operation Desert Storm, when the
military realized that greater flexibility and quicker reaction were imperative
and could be realized through increased afloat prepositioning.
Boyanton thinks that another major factor for success during the
Iraq engagement was in-transit visibility. And this, we learn, is related to
advanced technology. With a fast-moving force, the challenge on the logistics
side is to keep up and keep it supplied without putting too much of a
“logistics footprint” on the ground. One of the ways this was accomplished
in Iraq was with RFID tags, which can be read by a computerized interrogator.
General Franks had requested that all materiel entering the central
command theater of operation in ocean containers or on aircraft pallets
have a robust data tag so that military personnel at any point in the distribution
process could read it without having to access a remote database or
physically break into cargo to find out what was “in the box.”
The challenge for the future, says Boyanton, will be providing intransit
visibility “from source to foxhole.” In addition to enabling the customer
and other materiel managers to determine status at any time, the
military needs to collect consumption data to be recorded in such a way
that it automatically triggers resupply, similar to point-of-sale data collection
and inventory/reorder triggers in the consumer products industry. The
abiding question for the DoD FLE plan is: “Where is the end of the supply
chain for this purpose” Each of the military services has somewhat
different practices, and situational variables can cause modifications
within those practices.
Special Partnerships with Commercial Transport
Part of Boyanton’s responsibility is the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF)
and the Voluntary Intermodal Sealift Agreement (VISA). Each of these
programs gives the DoD a contract-based authority to mobilize U.S. flag
civilian air and ocean transportation resources, respectively. The air and
ocean carriers that make up CRAF and VISA were employed extensively