Posted on 08/28/2003 7:11:16 PM PDT by Mike Fieschko
When Maj. Gen. David E. Kratzer was chosen back in January to take his 377th Theater Support Command (TSC) in Kuwait to lead the support operation for a war in Iraq, one of the first things he did was read Moving Mountains: Lessons in Leadership and Logistics from the Gulf War, which is the theater support memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. Pagonis, the commander of the first TSC--a man who knew what it was to build what Kratzer has likened to a "city in the sand."
To launch and sustain a massive invasion and occupation of Iraq, the 377th would command specialists in food, power and water; military police; fire and medical services; transportation; air and seaport operations; personnel; finance; and all the record-keeping and accountability inherent in those services. Its domestic downtrace of a handful of units swelled to eight general-officer commands, 13 colonel-level commands and nearly 30,000 soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen. Members of the command also supervised countless civilian contractors, both American and Kuwaiti. In effect, the 377th ran all the manpower, facilities and transportation necessary to support a major ground war -- and all for the highest stakes imaginable.
"We are here for one reason only," Kratzer would recount later. "To take care of that soldier who is in that foxhole. If you keep that goal in mind then everything else fits into place."
Moving Mountains is not at heart a war story -- bookstores carry it in the management section, and likewise Kratzer's task was more about managing inventory than infantry. The concept of the TSC had been conceived to support the U.S. military's first major war since Vietnam, and with it Pagonis had brought military logistics to the brink of the 20th century. But the intervening 12 years of information management advances since then have changed the world all over again.
So as Secretary Rumsfeld, Gen. Franks and ground forces commander Lt. Gen. David McKiernan were seeking to transform the military's warfighting style and wage a leaner, meaner, better coordinated Gulf War II, Kratzer wanted to update Pagonis' 20th century mountain-moving with the just-in-time concepts and technologies of the 21st century.
"Twelve years ago, this thing called the 'support command' was really an ad hoc organization that the Army felt it had to create in order to provide the needed support structure," Kratzer said. "It's been a very interesting comparison as we've seen the advantages that we have today through technology, and also the lessons learned, now that we've had the opportunity to read that book and look at what had taken place before."
What had taken place before wasn't always pretty. Containers in the tens of thousands stacked up in the Saudi Arabian ports, waiting to be picked up and moved on. Warfighting soldiers like the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized) lined up, waiting idle (and a tempting target for the enemy) while support troops cracked the containers open, one by one, to find out what was inside, who needed it and where it had to go. Hard words were used in describing some of the situations -- inefficiencies, wasted manpower and the dirtiest word in the logistician's dictionary -- backlog.
Enter Brig. Gen. Jack Stultz, commanding general of the 143rd Transportation Command. Like Kratzer, he was an Army reservist -- and a logistical manager for consumer products' supplier Procter & Gamble in his civilian life. The 377th had established prepositioned stocks of supplies in warehouses on U.S. bases in Kuwait, but the rest had to come off ships at the docks of Shuaiba Port in Kuwait and the Kuwait Naval Base. Meanwhile, the flow of troops coming in through the Kuwait International Airport had to be managed so that neither they nor their equipment ever spent time sitting around. Kratzer knew that air and seaport operations -- getting the soldiers and their equipment and ammunition into the theater at the same time and getting both quickly on to where they were needed -- was going to make or break the operation. He selected Stultz to be his deputy commander.
Stultz would run prewar operations with the same efficiency that he employed at Proctor & Gamble. Part of what made things run better was sheer transportation muscle. New crane-equipped, large medium speed roll-on/roll-off ships, in concert with smaller landing craft utility boats staffed by Army reservists from Florida and North Carolina, could download 1,500 to 2,000 pieces of equipment from sea to shore in less than 48 hours. Heavy equipment transporters, in short supply during Pagonis' day, could speed tanks, ammunition and equipment up Kuwaiti highways to where they were needed most. Those two items alone, Stultz estimated, improved his operation's efficiency by 50 percent over what had been achieved in the first Gulf War.
The rest was using the technology that had become commonplace in the private sector. At the Shuaiba Port in Kuwait, units like the Army Reserve's 1184th Transportation Terminal Battalion used radio frequency identification tags and scanners to inventory what was in a container, who it belonged to, and where it needed to go.
"It's just like at Wal-Mart," said Sgt. Melvin Polk of the 1184th as he scanned in vehicles belonging to the 101st Airborne Division. "These handheld scanners make it pretty easy, and they keep the line moving fast, which is what it's all about."
At the aerial port of debarkation, a stone's throw from Kuwait International Airport, movement control teams scanned the identification cards of troops coming into the theater with the same technology. The software instantly entered the arriving soldiers information into a database that allowed Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) to schedule units for a timely reunion with their equipment. At Camp Arifjan, the 38th Ordnance Group, an active duty command staffed with deployed reservists like the Army Reserve's 802nd Ordnance Company, used the same scanners to stock northbound trucks, and swore they could tell better than CNN how the war was going by the ebb and flow of orders from the front.
By the time diplomacy ran out and Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched on March 19, the 143rd had downloaded more than 100 ships -- and ushered more beans, bullets, tanks and trucks through Shuaiba than had been off-loaded at two Saudi ports during Desert Storm. A given day found no more than a few hundred containers sitting on the docks, and those were usually gone by morning. Kratzer was calling Stultz "a true hero." And few of the first Gulf War logistics nightmares were repeated.
"If you would go to the port today, I think we have 115 containers that are waiting to move someplace," Kratzer said just before hostilities began.
"And every day in this deployment, we have cleared the port and we've cleared the soldiers who are coming through the airport."
"We didn't build a mountain in this campaign," Stultz added. "We moved it and smoothed it out and provided just-in-time delivery, much like you do in the civilian sector. It didn't hurt that many of the troops under the 377th -- two thirds are reservists, mostly Army Reserve -- had civilian expertise to bring to the table."
"We have privates who are Ph.D.s," Kratzer said. "Our military police running the enemy prisoner of war camp are reservists from New York -- many of them are in law enforcement at home; and we have all the medical providers, the doctors, the nurses, the veterinarians, preventive medicine health care workers. All of those people are predominantly reservists, and we simply could not do this without them."
Kratzer was not the only general officer to voice such a view. "I have a far greater appreciation for what the reserve components do now than I did in the past," said Brig. Gen. Sean Byrne, active duty commander of the Army Reserve 3rd Personnel Command (PERSCOM) out of Jackson, Miss. "It's marvelous to have people like my strength accountability managers. I found out that they're systems analysts in their civilian communities." He laughed. "And my wife feels a lot better that my driver over here is a San Antonio police officer."
Operation Iraqi Freedom was the first time that a PERSCOM had been put under a TSC's control. The move was in response to what Gen. Byrne called "some black eyes" received during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, particularly in the two most visible operations for any PERSCOM -- mail and casualty reporting. Gen. Byrne, like commanders across the support structure, credits technological advances with addressing the lessons of the first Gulf War.
The same database-enabled handheld scanners that recorded which units had come for their equipment, instantly told PERSCOM the name, rank and social security number -- and blood type and finance type and anything else they needed to know -- of every soldier, DoD contractor and embedded reporter in theater. Once hostilities slowed, more automation and better communications helped the postal operation sort and deliver as much as 600,000 pounds of mail per day. Updated defense casualty system software helped Gen. Byrne's people close the gaps in troop and casualty tracking and notification.
"We've not had the stories we had in Desert Shield/ Desert Storm, where soldiers somehow got lost in the medical system," Byrne said. "We've had overall accountability probably well within the Army standard of one to two percent, so I think that's been a great success. The automation has really worked to our advantage with that."
As the fighting forces in Iraq moved in closer concert with real-time battlefield maps and satellite communications, Gen. Kratzer's support operation was doing the same. From his base of operations at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, giant television screens hooked the 377th into war operations and command briefings. Masses of broadband cables protruding from every cubicle wall hooked up staffers to databases and e-mail and gave the 377th real-time visibility of everything that was moving in theater -- the supplies, vehicles and the fighting troops who needed them. Around every corner was a different kind of uniform.
"Army Transformation, as Gen. Eric Shinseki has described it -- we're living it here," Kratzer said. "We have marines and we have soldiers working together. The Navy element is sitting about 20 feet from us right here," Gen. Kratzer said. "And this place looks like Star Wars," he marveled. "We have all the technology I think that anybody has ever seen assembled in one place ... We have not brought in all of the people that a theater support can bring in, but we've found that if we work very intelligently, we can use a smaller force and be much more powerful. It's a view of the future."
The process of supporting and supplying the invasion of Iraq was not without its kinks. Sending troops forward with a basic load of just five to seven days of supplies proved to be cutting it close when stiff Iraqi resistance pinched off supply routes like the one through Nasiriyah. And even in a logistics effort that deployed unprecedented amounts of cutting-edge technology and automation, those familiar with the technology wanted more of it (just as those unfamiliar with it probably wanted less).
"We still need more bandwidth, more lines, to be able to tap into the Internet more and move information faster without clogging up the pipes," said Maj. Edward McGowan, information management officer for 3rd PERSCOM and a network administrator in civilian life. "And we need better equipment across the board."
At its Armed Forces Appreciation Day luncheon on May 30, the New Orleans Regional Chamber of Commerce made a special presentation to Gen. Kratzer and the 377th -- in absentia, of course -- for providing the longest single logistical support operation ever to the U.S. military. Kratzer himself, after spending the last year in Afghanistan leading a civil-military task force bringing humanitarian aid into that theater and running the 377th in Kuwait since January, came back to the United States in August.
But the job is far from over. Military logisticians still ponder faster, cheaper and more effective ways to get supplies, ammunition and incoming units rotating into theater through the ports and on to duty. Gen. Stultz plans to move his base of operations forward from Shuaiba to Tallil Air Base in central Iraq.
As this is written, the 800th Military Police Brigade still watches over captured Iraqis near the port city of Umm Qasr and the forklifts at the ammunition supply point still move bullets, bombs and missiles up north to where Iraqi paramilitaries still pose a threat. Soldiers still draw pay, eat chow, and get lonely for care packages from home. The TSCs doctors, nurses and medics still treat the wounded, and the 3rd PERSCOM, entering a new busy season now with replacement units rotating into theater and war-weary ones going home, still tracks casualties and reports the dead. On June 19, the 377th lost Army Reserve ambulance driver Spc. Paul Nakamura of the 437th Medical Company out of Riverside, Calif. He was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade during an ambush on a highway south of Baghdad.
But as the logistical deployment of beans, bullets and soldiers into Iraq moves into long-term sustainment, Gen. Stultz knows that the 377th's success or failure will be judged by history -- and the Pentagon -- on how the war for Iraq, with all its phases, ends.
Stultz recounted what Gen. McKiernan told him during an initial meeting. "The guys back in Washington and the guys back in Central Command in Tampa are probably not going to understand this -- but the biggest concern we have is logistics. If we can't sustain the force on the battlefield, we're wasting bringing the force over here. A tank without ammunition and fuel is just a piece of metal. You guys have got to make us succeed. Without you we can't succeed. You know, CSS [Combat Service Support] will not win a war, but CSS will sure lose a war."
So far, so good.
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