Services need to share logistics information.

The lack of accurate information about supply requirements, shipments and deliveries has hurt military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Learning how to fix those information gaps is one of the most important lessons of the war, according to Vice Adm. Gordon S. Holder, director of logistics, J4, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"If we could get that right, we would save lots of money and do things a lot faster," he told National Defense.

As logistics director, Holder does not run the organizations that provide equipment and supplies to U.S. troops. Instead, he advises the joint chief's on such matters, and that is turning out to be a much bigger job than he first thought.

His job over the past three years, has been anything but boring, as he seeks to help guide some of the most complex movements of U.S. troops and materiel ever attempted.

At the moment, U.S. military services are just completing the rotation of an estimated 240,000 troops--and more than a million tons of cargo--into and out of the U.S. Central Command.

Making the transfers happen smoothly has required the close cooperation of all of the services, Holder said. Recognizing the joint nature of the mission, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in September 2003 named the U.S. Transportation Command--which provides air, land and sea mobility for all of the services--to be the "distribution process owner" for the entire department. In this assignment, TRANSCOM was expected to:

* Eliminate existing seams between traditional distribution processes and standardize policies and performance goals in the military supply chain.

* Encourage all the services to use information technology that can work together, keeping better track of people and goods as they move from the United States across the globe.

* Institutionalize sustainment planning into contingency processes.

* Streamline distribution accountability under a single combatant commander, providing one accountable person for war fighters to contact with their supply needs.

Previously, no single command or agency has ever been responsible for making the defense distribution system work. Supplies are procured and stored by a myriad of organizations within the department, while TRANSCOM provides strategic mobility.

The result is a fragmented distribution system, with many parts of the chain acting independently, Holder said. "The good news is that, in a crisis, everybody wants to do the right thing," he said. "The bad news is, when the crisis ends, everybody wants to revert to the old way of doing things. It's a leadership thing."

As DPO, TRANSCOM is expected to change that, he said. TRANSCOM, headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., consists of three units:

The Air Force's Air Mobility Command, with a fleet of C-130, C-17 and C-5 transport aircraft, KC-135 tankers and 141,000 personnel, provides strategic airlift.

The Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution command formerly the Military Traffic Management Command--with about 4,500 people, is responsible for the global movement of combat units, cargo, military household goods and privately owned vehicles.

The Navy's Military Sealift Command, Holder's previous assignment, is a force of about 7,700, providing sealift via a fleet of government-owned and chartered U.S.-flagged ships. It also prepositions ships, loaded with supplies and equipment, in strategic locations around the world, such as the Mediterranean Sea, and the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans.

"The MSC moves more than 90 percent of all military supplies and equipment," Holder said. "It's still the best option to move very heavy material."

The stars of the sealift were the MSC's 18 large, medium-speed, roll-on/roll-off vessels, said TRANSCOM's chief, Air Force Gen. John W. Handy. During the war's initial operations, he said, they completed 38 voyages, lifting more than 5.23 million square feet of cargo.

"This was approximately 26 percent of the total requirement," Handy told a House Armed Services Committee hearing. One LMSR during the current war carried the equivalent of six commercial charter ships during the first Gulf War, Handy said. Also, he said, it takes 300 C-17s to deliver the amount of cargo carried by one LMSR.

The shipments contain everything from M-1A1 Abrams tanks to Meals, Ready to Eat. The trick is to ensure that the material that was ordered arrives at its destination on time and in the correct quantities, Holder said.

In previous wars, he said, as packers rushed to meet demand, supplies often would be stuffed into containers or lashed onto pallets without labels listing their contents. Shippers frequently failed to retain vital information, such as shipment dates and destinations.

As a result, when cargoes arrived at overseas supply dumps, they often had to be set aside, creating so-called "steel mountains," until service personnel had time to dig through the containers and find the supplies they were seeking.

Uncertain when--or if--they would receive the necessary material, many supply sergeants would order two or three times what they actually needed, Holder said. "It's absolutely a trust factor," he said. "If I order this much, will I have enough? Or should I order more, just to make sure?"

To correct this problem, the department has embarked upon an ambitious effort to improve in-transit visibility of cargo. The Defense Logistics Agency--which acquires, stores, packs and ships military supplies--has begun using "Pure 463-L Pallets," said DLA's director, Vice Adm. Keith W. Lippert.

"These pallets contain only freight for a specific customer and do not need to move in a circuitous route or be packed and repacked for the delivery of goods to another customer," he told a congressional hearing. "This results in a more efficient transportation system, speeding cargo through transshipment points, and reducing breakout and repackaging of cargo, with quicker arrivals at the end-user's location."

In January, the Pentagon began requiring suppliers to put radio-frequency identification tags on shipped material. The department is following in the steps of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which said in 2003 that its top 100 suppliers would be required to use the tags.

RFID tags contain microchips, that when scanned, emit a unique identification signal. Tagged items can be added quickly to inventory databases and even tracked wirelessly for short distances.

Active RFID tags are being used on cases, pallets and individual packaging of items that require an individual identified, said Alan Estevez, assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for supply chain integration. This includes items with more than $5,000 of value, key components of major weapons platforms and things--such as weapons--that are tracked by serial numbers daily. In January 2005, passive tags will be required on all cases and pallets.

This deadline, however, will be difficult to meet, suppliers said, because the technical standards for passive tags have yet to be settled. (See story p. 14)

Much of the in-transit confusion occurs when the supplies arrive in theater, and are taken from ships or aircraft and placed on trucks for shipment to their ultimate destination.

To reduce the confusion, TRANSCOM put a CENTCOM Deployment Distribution Operations Center, a team of more than 60 transportation, supply and logistics experts from all of the services, under the direct command of CENTCOM's chief, Gen. John Abizaid.

"Within just a couple of days, file CDDOC identified more than 1,700 containers of oversupplied cargo that--because of our increased ability to see into the pipeline--was not forwarded to theater," said Marine Lt. Gen. Gary H. Hughey, deputy commander of TRANSCOM. "This pays dividends in a lighter, more mobile force and cost savings to the American taxpayer."

TRANSCOM is drawing up plans to forming CDDOC-like units in other war-fighting commands worldwide, Hughey told the 2004 Navy Logistics Conference & Exhibition in Reston, Va.

These efforts haven't resolved all of the logistical problems in the current conflict, Holder said, but "there are more small hills than steel mountains."

In the future, he said, supplies may flow to the battlefield not through ports or over the beaches, as they have since World War II, but through a family of "sea bases." In the sea-basing concept now being developed by the Navy, a new fleet of yet-to-be-designed maritime pre-positioned ships, operating far off the enemy's coast, would serve as the base of operations for U.S. forces.

These ships--accessible to high-speed vessels and cargo-transporting aircraft--would take on and off-load troops, weapons and supplies, reducing the need to acquire bases in neighboring countries or to seize enemy beaches, Holder explained.

"The beach, for all the blood that we shed on it, was never an objective," Holder said. "It was just away to the objective. Sea basing has the potential to replace that beach."