Opening this subtheme, logistics are the sinew that enable the political, economic, and strategic capacity to be translated to tactical military achievement. The stronger the logistics, the more effective the application of strength to activity. (Which paradoxically, if you become very logistically capable, can be a problem as it enables the continuation of bad policies and strategies.) The logistics perspective of war and defense is clarifying at all levels of operation. It offers insight that is based in the reason defined by time and space. On its best days, a logistics focus can win wars.
To open this perspective, here I will lay the basic components of my argument for Logistics as its own domain, Logpower. Enjoy!
On Logpower
Once you master strategy and logistics, it becomes impossible not to see their greater potential in co-equal combination. For several years I have been crafting the framework to achieve this, to make logistics a domain of warfare capable of delivering success in war/conflict according to an understood theory of victory. That is Logpower.
Crazy, you think, is that possible? Or, more likely, what is a domain/theory of victory? This brief explainer will settle both questions.
The matter of a domain is the first concern. Logpower is to be conceptually analogous to Land, Sea, or Air Powers. Starting there, we already have the emerging contours of a domain. To continue, consider Landpower. You understand it to be defined ideally as the clash of armies to take and hold territories and their populations. This may be enabled by capabilities from the other domains, but the leading edge of the strategic wedge, the thing which decides the outcome, is an army operating on terra firma. By the defeat of the enemy forces and/or the ability to hold the important ground, victory is achieved. Thus, we can understand a domain to be a definable, circumscribable context within which concepts of applied capability of the relevant force can achieve policy objectives.
From the foregoing we also have the developing form of a “theory of victory.” Distilled, it conveys the existence of one or many viable arguments of actions that can reliably achieve policy objectives. That for Landpower having been covered, consider instead Seapower. The most reliable model of naval dominance is maintaining freedom of navigation of the critical sea lanes of communication. On the balance of this theory of victory, the British Empire was built by the strength of the Royal Navy’s ability to maintain sufficient control of the critical straits of passage necessary to move trade and troops to, from, and between its colonies as needed. Continuing this tradition, while the strength of Landpower built the American Continental Empire, it was Seapower and taking up the British naval mission that has made the United States the preeminent global power.
How then do we define the domain and theory of victory for Logpower? First, the domain is comprised of the extant work of military logistics. And if this seems facile, it is so by design. What is especially important to this idea is that it requires nothing new in capacity or capabilities, merely the imagination to assemble them as a coherent whole towards a unified concept of logistical operation, not in support of activities within the physical domains. The theory of victory sustaining Logpower is that the delivery of goods and services, protection and repair of infrastructure and transport, and maintenance of public utilities, often for the benefit of a local civilian population, are sufficient to deliver policy objectives.
Did the Romans not engineer their way to an Empire? It is arguably correct.
But for modern war, can we assert Logpower is feasible? Using an example from Air Power, the delivery of critical goods in the Berlin Airlift stood down the Soviets in the first confrontation of the Cold War. Before that was the Allied humanitarian planning as part of the overall logistics for the liberation of WEUR. Because my research was on subsistence logistics, I had more scope to see campaign preparations for civilian quotidian needs. Given the scope of the 1944 bombings in anticipation of the offensive and the deprivations from a decade of war, the Allies had many concerns about the condition of life in the territories under Nazi control, and included their remediation in the development of material requirements. This would prevent civilian theft from critical military supply lines and would endear the Allied forces to the locals, in both cases directly serving the objective of defeating the Nazis and bringing a better peace in the wake of war.
Can Logpower serve contemporary strategic challenges? The Ukraine War certainly supports argument. The next installment on Sinews will address the nesting doll of logistics strategies that have defined the fight to liberate Ukraine from Moscow’s aggression.