Of all the challenges America's military faces, the one least susceptible to a fiscal or technological fix is geography.  The vast oceans that protected the United States from attack for much of its history are a major logistical problem when the military needs to get to a foreign conflict fast.  That's one reason why so much of the joint force was forward deployed in Eurasia during the Cold War -- military planners knew they couldn't react quickly to communist aggression if warfighters needed to be transported all the way from the Western Hemisphere.

Today, though, the network of bases and troop deployments that once ringed the Sino-Soviet periphery has largely been dismantled, and the recent actions of countries like Turkey and the Philippines suggest wartime access to other countries' facilities can't be assumed.  Thus military transportation will play a central role in determining whether the United States wins future wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East or the Western Pacific.

The National Defense Transportation Association spent several days this week discussing the challenges that presents at its annual meeting in Saint Louis.  The reason it chose Saint Louis for the conclave is that the U.S. Transportation Command is headquartered nearby at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, and Transcom (as it called) is the nerve center for all military movements worldwide.  Transcom commander General Darren W. McDew didn't try to sugar-coat the challenges that his command faces in the current environment.

General McDew thinks that strategic lines of communication into future war zones will be subject to interdiction by adversaries, and that logisticians need to start thinking more seriously about the possibility of wartime attrition.  He also thinks that future enemies aren't going to conveniently arrange their operations to conform with the jurisdictional boundaries of U.S. regional commands around the world.  Fighting will spill across regions in a fashion that requires hard choices about which commands get what resources when.

And McDew is worried about cybersecurity.  Unlike the Pentagon's other eight unified commands, McDew has to rely heavily on commercial companies to accomplish his missions, and cyber protections are uneven from company to company in the sector.  When the U.S. was directing most of its military efforts toward the defeat of rag-tag insurgents in the Middle East, cybersecurity wasn't all that big a concern.  But if the enemy is Russia or China, network security could determine whether the war effort succeeds or fails.

McDew has a lot of experience at dealing with such challenges.  He previously led the Air Force's Mobility Command co-located with Transcom at Scott AFB, and he has experience flying most of that command's planes-- both airlifters and aerial-refueling tankers.  But as the four-star head of the military's single manager for all global transportation, he has to integrate planning and execution for all air, sea and ground movements.

That includes a lot of players, from the Air Force's mobility community to the diverse participants in the Navy's Military Sealift Command to the Army's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command.  Because it isn't feasible to organically sustain all the assets needed to project the joint force overseas in wartime, each of these commands must deal with a host of private-sector participants in accomplishing its missions.  For instance, the Navy has agreements with U.S.-flag ocean cargo companies, and the Air Force relies on a "civil reserve air fleet" of jetliners operated by commercial carriers.

Even in peacetime, it wouldn't make much sense for the defense department to carry out most of its cargo movements using high-priced military personnel and dedicated distribution channels, so it's a rare day that there aren't hundreds of commercial truckers and rail cars moving materiel around the country.  General McDew's job is to make sure all these moving pieces mesh seamlessly, and to be ready if the joint force has to surge overseas to remote war zones on short notice.

However, cyber threats are not the only challenge making his job more difficult.  One problem is that modern war doesn't unfold as a series of sequential steps, the way traditional conflicts did.  All of the phases in a conflict today may unfold simultaneously, forcing logisticians to respond in an ad hoc fashion that bears little resemblance to war plans of the past.  When you don't know what the enemy is going to throw at you next, it is difficult to allocate scarce transportation assets efficiently.

A second problem is that there is little historical precedent for the fiscal paralysis and partisanship currently prevailing in Washington.  The federal government has not completed a full budget in time for the beginning of the new fiscal year since 1997.  With continuing resolutions the order of the day and defense spending capped by congressional mandate, it must be hard for Transcom to plan how its budget is allocated from year to year.

And then there is the decay of the commercial transport sector, as declining demand fosters a wrenching consolidation of carriers.  Half a dozen air carriers with which Transcom once did business have disappeared, and now the same trend is unfolding among oceangoing cargo lines.  Truckers are being forced out by low rates and high insurance premiums.  Rail lines are stressed by declining oil and coal deliveries, plus a shift away from transcontinental shipping now that the Panama Canal has been widened.  There's even a commercial pilot shortage.

General McDew is a "can do" leader who exudes confidence.  That presumably has something to do with how he became a four-star.  But his command faces a host of challenges his predecessors did not, and the one thing that hasn't changed is that combatant commanders tend to simply assume whatever transport they need will be available when they need it.  The reason Transcom was created in the first place was that the Reagan Administration figured out military transport wasn't getting sufficient attention even though it was crucial to victory.

Today military transportation has the integrated oversight and leadership that it lacked in earlier days.  What it doesn't have is a political system that is paying attention to the emerging challenges that could make it much harder for the joint force to get to the next war in a timely fashion.  This may be the Achilles heel in current warfighting plans.  As Benjamin Franklin once observed about the consequences of neglect, "for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the rider was lost."

Loren B. Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the non-profit Lexington Institute and Chief Executive Officer of Source Associates, a for-profit consultancy. Prior to holding his present positions, he was Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University and taught graduate-level courses in strategy, technology and media affairs at Georgetown. He has also taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Image: U.S. Air Force