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Growing responsibilities

Furthering this quest, USTRANSCOM took one of the most profound steps in logistics history Jan. 18, 2004, when it established the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Deployment and Distribution Operations Center (CDDOC) in Kuwait. “Good war fighters always want to know where their logistic experts are well before the battle starts and during the battle,” Handy says. If you consider that for Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Afghanistan campaign those experts were USTRANSCOM’s supply line systems analysts, they were back home at Scott AFB, Ill., and DLA’s headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va. Command structure dictated that USTRANSCOM was responsible only for delivering supplies and troops to the theater. From there, the theater commander took charge. “So much was pushed to theater he could not consume it or even identify it,” Handy says.

So, Handy offered to extend USTRANSCOM’s tracking system into the theater. A group of 63 USTRANSCOM, DLA, and other supply line experts deployed to Kuwait, setting up their CDDOC in the same building as the Coalition Forces Land Component Command and, significantly, answering to the combatant commander, not USTRANSCOM.

“We were able to sit in on their briefings and on a daily basis deal with all the [logistics] issues in theater,” says Col. Wayne Patty, USAR, formerly the CDDOC deputy director and now USTRANSCOM’s chief of performance and initiative division. “Being face to face and [being] able to get to the decision makers in a quick fashion, I believe, was critical to the success we had over there.”

That success USTRANSCOM measures as a savings of $400 million worth of transportation costs. For example, the CDDOC experts discovered 937 inbound containers of construction material nobody ordered or, for that matter, needed because local supply stocks could meet the need. The order was canceled and the material diverted. The CDDOC also discovered some 300 damaged Humvee vehicles in theater waiting to be shipped home for depot work. “The people in theater didn’t have the time or wherewithal to ship that stuff,” Handy says.

CDDOC also became an arbiter in prioritizing shipments and determining what would be delivered by sea, air, and truck. It supplemented the individual service’s “green sheeting” of supply requests—the highest-priority items—with a “purple sheet” available only to the CENTCOM commander. “Purple sheeting is a joint commander’s trump card,” says Maj. Chris Benoit, USA, who was a transportation planner with the CDDOC.

The key to what Benoit sees as a “paradigm shift” is the overarching vision CDDOC gave that combatant commander, a first in war fighting history.

“He was able to reach all the way back to supply centers in [the continental United States (CONUS)] and say, ‘Hey, do we have this in inventory [and if so], is it en route?; If not, when can we get it delivered?’” Patty says. “We would be able to look in the distribution pipeline all the way from depot to warehouse [to flight or ship manifests] and say, ‘Here is where an M-16 bolt is located.’”

Up to the challenge

In April, as it still was working the big picture to improve theater supply distribution and efficiently rotate troops, the CDDOC was called upon to help fight an Iraqi insurgency bent on interdicting the supply line.

“They took out bridges, blew up roads; they knew the routes, somewhat, [that] we were taking,” Patty says. With up to 90 percent of supplies moving by ground, “We had to look at the impact of convoys not arriving in a timely manner, and what is on those convoys that units aren’t getting.”

Drawing upon its expertise in networking and transportation, the CDDOC started employing what Patty refers to as its “scarcest asset”— C-130 aircraft, which are used primarily as a troop carrier—to move some of the hottest items: munitions, food, and fuel.

Dail, a career logistician who served with the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) during Desert Storm and ran forward airfields, sums up the effect of the CDDOC: “I wish that USTRANSCOM [had] developed a joint logistics deployment and distribution operation capability when I was a younger officer in overseas combat operations.”

Others share Dail’s wish today. In a matter of months since its inception, Patty says, CDDOCs have been requested “by combatant commanders across the board” in all the major commands: Europe, Southern, Pacific, and Korea.

As it continues to hone the distribution process for the entire U.S. military and meet ongoing demands as the nation’s armed forces transporter, USTRANSCOM is benchmarking other shippers, such as the tracking systems of ups and Federal Express, the just-in-time delivery systems of Wal-Mart and even the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, and the load efficiency measures of trucking companies. Meantime, “industry benchmarks us,” Handy says.

He points out, though, that drawing parallels is difficult: Commercial enterprises, which really don’t care what is in the box, deliver to fixed stores in known cities.

“The system I run has customers that don’t follow the rules, we have stores that pop up in other countries, and when the box is delivered people are shooting at you. And we must know what’s in the box. Tell somebody to move 4.7 million tons of cargo 9,000 miles and back again in the time frame we need to; they don’t want that job.”

An elephantine challenge, to be sure.