Applied Maintenance and Logistics Options in the Warfighters 21

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs the current review of Department of Defense (DOD) structures, capabilities, and plans are coming to completion and moving into implementation phases, a focus to maintain is the delivery of mission capabilities for the front line warfighters. The mission capabilities packages are supported by the material, and also by the materiel support process, which includes not only the hardware, but more importantly the people, training, maintenance and support, and the doctrine, concepts of operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures for the material.Following an updated discussion on operational engineering, this paper expands the authors’ concept of operational engineering, to several applied logistics options and discussions in support of rapid decisive operations. It finishes with an introductory discussion of a logistics commander operational planning tool, which potentially can support and enable generation of rapid decisive operations. This tool could assist combatant commanders and their warfighters to operate inside the decision cycle of opponents on the front lines.Further, the concepts addressed align with the Quadrennial Defense Review 2001 task: to “Provide sufficient mobility, including airlift, sealift, prepositioning, basing infrastructure, alternative points of debarkation, and new logistical concepts of operations, to conduct expeditionary operations in distant theaters against adversaries armed with weapons of mass destruction and other means to deny access to U.S. forces” [emphasis added](QDR 2001).