Free Republic

The military's logistics system needs to be further modernized to better serve today's war fighters, a senior Defense Department transformation official asserted here today. Retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, pointed out to attendees at a downtown digital communications conference that U.S. ground forces racing toward Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom had often outstripped their supply chain. That happened, the admiral noted, in part because logisticians use separate information and command and control systems apart from those that warfighters use. "The fact of the matter is that there is dysfunction from...

If you ask retired Navy Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski why service members and Defense Department civilian employees should care about efforts to transform the military, he is neither hesitant nor uncertain in his response. "There are two ways of looking at it. First, with so much transformation going on today, and so many efforts so broadly dispersed throughout the operating forces, all of our people – soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, Coast Guardsmen and civilians – have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor," Cebrowski said. "They have the opportunity to not only see change take place in front...