A common military phrase that I heard again and again, from long sea voyages to the mountains of Afghanistan, is that “amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.” Sometimes attributed to General of the Army Omar Bradley, it simply means that even the best strategies and tactics will fail if you don’t have capable logisticians who can ensure the supply chains work seamlessly.
As we fight through a national campaign to defeat the novel coronavirus, we will turn increasingly to skilled logisticians to solve shortages of test kits, high-grade masks and other personal protective gear, as well as hospital equipment such as ventilators, palliative drugs and, eventually we hope, vaccines.
In order to understand what the military can (and cannot) do in supporting domestic authorities, I turned to the best military logistician I know: retired Air Force Lieutenant General Mark Ramsay. I’ve known Ramsay for decades, and was lucky enough to have his deep expertise on my staff when I was supreme allied commander at NATO. He was the brains behind our operational planning and supply chains into Afghanistan, the Balkans, on counterpiracy operations at sea off Africa, and in the short but highly complex campaign in Libya. We had a recent conversation over email, and here is what he had to say:
James Stavridis: Does it makes sense to move equipment (specifically ventilators, but really everything medical) from hot spot to hot spot, as Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York has suggested? What is the best way to do that? Could the military help?
Mark Ramsay: The US military has a wide range of transportation and logistics systems it can use to support this pandemic, and some of them have already been put to use. The Defense Department’s Transportation Command, using its air, land and sea components, can take advantage of military and commercial assets to service hot spots and other key areas.
For example, for very time-sensitive movements, they have access to a fleet of “operational support airlift" aircraft from all the services that can move small pieces of equipment and personnel through the country and in select regions worldwide. They can also use military assets or existing private-sector contracts to move items via commercial airlift, ships, trains and trucks. Governors have the authority to use the National Guard in their states to move equipment, materiel and personnel.
JS: Since this started, there have been a lot of vague calls to have the military do things. What can it do, and what can’t it do from a logistics perspective?
MR: The most visible example to date is the deployment of the Navy's two hospital ships, the Comfort and the Mercy, to New York City and Los Angeles, respectively. In addition, military medical personnel have been moved to the front lines of supporting civilian hospitals in hot spots such as New York City. If necessary, the military can also transport very ill and contagious patients using air transportable isolation units, which were designed and purchased during the Ebola outbreak in Africa in the mid-2010s.
It can also provide logistics supplies on hand, such as the personal protective equipment desperately needed to protect first responders and medical personnel, as well as other medical supplies such as disinfectants and medications. The military can be called on to construct field hospitals and provide everything necessary to operate them, such as power and clean drinking water, or to convert existing buildings to hospitals as they did in New York with the Javits Center. Finally, military members are assisting with virus testing, and can provide security where necessary and within existing laws.
What the military can do is limited for the most part only by our imagination and creativity.
JS: The military has done some fast things, as you mentioned, but this is going to be with us for months. What are the longer-term, larger-scale things the military will do and should do?
MR: The military will likely continue to surge until such time as the infection rate and hospitalizations drop dramatically. We are a nation at war with an invisible enemy, and the military is in the trenches, slogging it out with civilian agencies in the lead to end the pandemic. As we win the tactical battles, the military will have to reverse course and redeploy all the assets we've put in place to include people and equipment, and then reconstitute our force as necessary.
In the long term, which I'll define as later this year when the pandemic should largely be in our rearview mirror, the Pentagon and other key government agencies and industry must come together and lead a lessons-learned and strategic-planning process to prepare for future outbreaks of this nature. This has to be done apolitically by focusing on what we did right and wrong across the nation, from detection to treatment to social distancing and much more. Something along the lines of what was done in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and after the Sept. 11 attacks. The military knows how to conduct reviews and strategic planning, and must be at the center of this effort.
JS: If we had seen this coming, how would the Pentagon have prepared differently? What do you envision it doing in preparation for next time?
MR: One thing would have been putting in motion protective measures sooner for our own troops to include stopping travel, and activating key aspects of our force such as our medical responders afloat and ashore, as well as engineers and security personnel that have assisted with building hospital capacity. As I said, we need a national plan across our whole of government that can be put into motion once a potential pandemic has been identified. It has to address/create a national stockpile of personal protective equipment and other critical medical items, and the US industrial base needs the capacity and commitment to build it at home.
This pandemic showed our Achilles’ heel of outsourcing too much of our medical supplies to other nations, most notably China. This plan should also be extended to include our allies in NATO and elsewhere, and with key players such as the United Nations and World Health Organization. It should detail what sorts of national support we can provide to and from these organizations.
JS: Should there be a military czar appointed for the campaign, as New York Senator Chuck Schumer called for, either overall or for the military logistics role?
MR: I think the White House team needs a senior military logistics representative, perhaps the Joint Staff J4, who is a three-star officer, to be the “one face” for military logistics. He or she would hold the same rank as the surgeon general on the team now. The person tapped could also be someone like the three-star deputy commanders at Northern Command, which has responsibility for defending the homeland, or Transportation Command, which integrates mobility operations worldwide.
Bloomberg
