Advantage at Sea defines how the U.S. Sea Services will use integrated all-domain naval power in the daily competition and ambiguity of the gray zone while preparing for the possibility of a high-end fight. While previous conflicts have placed logisticians predominantly “in the rear with the gear,” in the Advantage at Sea paradigm, sustainment warfighters comprise the front lines of these logistics highways, ensuring the joints and muscles of sustainment networks are prepared for conflict.
Deterrence through Maritime Sustainment Networks
Sustainment organizations must evolve beyond the mindset of merely supporting. Sustainment warfighters map out complex networks of nodes to sustain operations based on precise and interdepended measurements, such as port depths, flight times, explosive arcs, and burn rates. The aggregation of these factors informs planning, posturing, and strategic messaging. While “effective logistics supports the development of offsets and deterrence pre-crisis,” the opposite creates gaps that enemies will exploit in conflict.
Sustainment undoubtedly will be contested during a conflict. In competition, sustainment is already opposed from the factory to the fleet, on the flight line, and in the fighting hole through cyberattacks. While combat forces are focused on preparing for and preventing conflict, sustainers are engaged daily in a low-end fight to keep logistics in place. The nodes of this network are often in locations identified as critical terrain by near-peer competitors. Organizations such as U.S. Transportation Command (TransCom) and Naval Supply Systems Command (NavSup) need to think and act more like Special Operations Command (SOCom) and naval special warfare (NSW), and vice versa.
Sustainment organizations like NavSup, Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NavFac), TransCom, and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) empower the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Logistics Enterprise, or JLEnt. The JLEnt is transitioning from decades of supporting operations in predominantly land battlespaces to predominantly maritime battlespaces.
Understanding how the Sea Services support and are supported by JLEnt is no longer solely an issue for naval logisticians. JLEnt must integrate across the warfighting functions. Effective deterrence requires integrating naval sustainment organizations with all instruments of national power—diplomatic, information, military, and economic (DIME). DoD emphasized the importance of gray zone activity by including a seventh warfighting function: information. Prior to this decision, another viable contender was also considered: engagement. While information warfare seeks to strengthen posture through strategic messaging, engagement pursues the same goal through direct human interaction, evidenced in tangible activities. The forward posturing of sustainment enablers allows the Sea Services to use engagement activities to shape the human “terrain” in critical sustainment nodes. Capitalizing on these activities with accurate messaging will contribute to mitigating the drivers of conflict while also demonstrating resolve.
Partners not Proxies: Engagement through Sustainment
Advantage at Sea prudently identifies the preeminence of partnership in competition, crisis, and conflict. Implied in the policy’s numerous references to alliances and cooperation is the need for a robust and operationally relevant sea service international affairs program. As with naval logisticians, these warfighters are engaged daily with U.S. partners in frontline gray zone competition to ensure access while aligning ends, ways, and means to support national security objectives.
For sustainment warfighters, competition is about gaining and maintaining access to critical locations while offsetting the effects of the sustainment networks of rivals. A Center for Strategic and International Studies report argues for “A Coalition Approach to Countering the BRI.” While the report rightly advocates engagement through “non-military tools,” it is worth considering how to use the Sea Services’ maritime sustainment expertise and partnerships.
One example is the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), which sustained the war in Afghanistan. Through this network, logisticians kept beans, bullets, and Band-aids coursing across roads, railways, seaports, and skies in dozens of countries, including Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Warfighting sustainers exercised the “D,” “I,” and “E” elements of national power to build capacity. In so doing, they indirectly supported the State Department’s New Silk Road Initiative, which sought to build lasting diplomatic partnerships with these same nations. Inland ports, such as Hairatan on the Uzbek/Afghan border, were improved, rail lines upgraded, and partner-nation security transportation companies benefited from a windfall of contracts. While these accomplishments are noteworthy, the resulting effects of sustainment activity on the other pillars of national power are underappreciated, but no less meaningful.
Naval logisticians excel in operational sustainment, as evidenced by the advanced naval base network’s activities in the Pacific theater during World War II. Naval logistics organizations are well-suited to support engagement through sustainment activities through organizations such as the Movement Coordination Center Europe. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act includes funding for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative with provisions for implementing a Movement Coordination Center Pacific to “coordinate and share airlift capacity with partners and allies.” These organizations allow DoD to institutionalize its partnership efforts and build lasting relationships with the professional sustainment cadres of partner nations.
The National Guard Bureau’s State Partnership Program provides a superb model of aligning whole-of-government engagement activities through partner nations with programs such as the Wisconsin National Guard’s partnership with Papua New Guinea. The Naval Reserves’ Maritime Partnership Program (MPP) has similar engagement experience. Through the MPP, the Reserves can provide the Navy with a cadre of gray-zone operators in competition while keeping active-duty forces honed for crisis and conflict. With appropriate coordination between the military departments, combatant commands, and country teams, the MPP could allow the Sea Services to synchronize their engagement efforts in critical sustainment terrain.
Sustainment as a Weapon System
It would be myopic to assume dollars and cents are a soft power panacea that will magically translate into sustainable relationships—the hearts and minds of the local population. Nonetheless, prudent employment of fiscal resources—choosing base locations, contracting billeting facilities, or choosing subsistence vendors—can have tangible effects in contested sustainment terrain. These actions can facilitate meaningful, lasting relationships unlikely to be achieved through military action. Naval sustainment organizations must understand how to wield multimillion dollar, multiyear financial arsenals, such as NavFac’s overseas contingency construction or NavSup’s ship husbanding contracts to support combatant commanders effectively.
Extrapolating the lessons of past decades of counterinsurgency can inform these de facto gray-zone warriors of the pros and cons of employing a money as a weapon system. DLA’s international fuels program, for instance, is a superb example of the economy of force and engagement benefits achieved through partnered sustainment. Naval sustainment professionals would do well to understand that you cannot buy trust, you cannot surge trust, and you cannot automate trust.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates opined for increased funding and empowerment of non-DoD executive branch organizations that encompass the DIME in his article, “The Over-militarization of American Foreign Policy.” Gates argues the “M” in DIME is often misunderstood—with many believing that military power is of value only when the D, I, and E efforts fail to bring about desired results. Naval sustainment organizations significantly affect the other pillars of DIME as they sustain warfighters on a worldwide scale.
To assist with synchronizing the effects of financial firepower, the Sea Services should increase their presence in the country teams of the embassies in allied and partner nations. The services must ensure country teams are fully aware of the robust engagement capacity of naval sustainment organizations. By aligning the Sea Services partnered maritime sustainment efforts with the State Department’s Integrated Country Strategies, they can significantly contribute to smart power.
Stand-In Sustainment Forces
The Navy’s contribution to Advantage at Sea, distributed maritime operations, calls for naval strike groups to provide the kinetic “teeth” of the integrated all domain naval force with a logistics “tail” ostensibly to follow. What if the Sea Services front-loaded the sustainment network required to sustain this force? Could sustainment forces positioned forward help Sea Services keep their metaphorical foot in the door, thereby reducing the blood and treasure required to ‘kick the door in later’? This is the essence of the Marine Corps’ part in Advantage at Sea, the expeditionary advanced base operations concept as espoused by the late Art Corbett. The Sea Services should capitalize on the existing posture, resources, and influence wielded by their respective sustainment organizations as a stand-in force of sorts.
DoD maintains cooperative security locations across the globe to support routine operations, while also anticipating their use in crisis and conflict. Naval sustainment organizations can be specifically organized, trained, and equipped to maintain relationships with our partners’ sustainment organizations. These teams would focus on establishing and improving the sustainment “terrain” at various JLEnt nodes. They would work closely with contracting professionals at the “steely” end of the money weapon.
Naval sustainment organizations such as the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC), Marine wing support squadrons, and landing support battalions must train routinely with partner nation sustainment organizations to close the “last hundred yards.” An example is when soldiers from TransCom’s Surface Deployment and Distribution Command conducted partnered sustainment training in Papua New Guinea. Sustainment engagement facilitates coordination with partner nation organizations that maintain key logistics nodes. These are the organizations that support the deployment, distribution, and maintenance of the ships, trucks, and aircraft of partnered forces in conflict. The Sea Services previously focused engagement efforts on conducting episodic tactical events in preparation for kinetic activity. Sailors, Marines, and Coast Guard personnel have much more to offer and their skills must be leveraged to dominate in contested maritime sustainment terrain.
The NECC is uniquely suited to be at the forefront of the Sea Services’ “engagement through sustainment” efforts. The NECC is essentially the Navy’s “miscellaneous drawer” of cross-cutting enablers, including maritime expeditionary security, explosive ordnance disposal, expeditionary intelligence, and expeditionary sustainment units. It already serves as a Sea Services integrator, with Marines and Coast Guard personnel fully embedded in its ranks enabling the NECC to clear, secure, build, and protect critical maritime sustainment nodes. Operationally, the NECC supports theater shaping plans in organizations such as the United States Indo-Pacific Command’s Civic Action Team, Palau, which reinforces relationships while improving sustainment infrastructure.
The NECC also supports the Navy Reserves through the Expeditionary Combat Readiness Command (ECRC). The Reserves oversee the Innovative Readiness Training (IRT) program, which provides the skilled personnel for projects such as the Marpo Heights Road improvement on Tinian. With additional funding and reserve authorities, the NECC would have additional capability and capacity for enduring partnered sustainment activities at crucial JLEnt nodes. The NECC can be a launchpad for “engagement through sustainment” activities by reinvigorating the Navy Reserve’s MPP.
Naval sustainment organizations are well equipped to maintain enduring relationships with local personnel and provide continuity to long-term projects. Sustainment professionals and contractors provide a lower profile presence than combat arms organizations and are generally easier to deploy and redeploy. These contractors must be aware of the challenges associated with the gray zone since they will regularly be in contact with potential adversarial counterparts who seek access and influence in the same locations.
As the Sea Services navigate the global commons with their partners, relationships fostered on the seas must be reinforced ashore. They must exercise their expeditionary maritime sustainment capabilities more frequently and on a broader scale. These efforts require coordinated consistency to those partner nations in which friendly boots on the ground best demonstrate trust. Such presence reflects integrated all-domain U.S. naval power consistent with the “Global Force for Good” motto.