First of all, in the media the stories I heard predictably highlighted the fact that IED attacks against our convoys is double from a year ago.
In the general's area of responsibility, we're talking 4,500 convoys each month (in a 30-day month).
When the military announced that the Air Force would fly some missions to alleviate the ground convoy attack problem, many people assumed that we had to fly a lot of stuff because we couldn't control the roads. But the briefing shows that air movement save 42 convoys per month. That's less than 1% of the total run every month. This is a marginal effort and the roads are still our main means of supply nothwithstanding the doubling of attacks.
And the doubling of attacks represents 120 per week. So fewer than 3% of convoys in a month will be hit by an IED.
What wasn't mentioned is that our casualties are down "significantly" from a year ago in these attacks despite the doubling of attacks.
The most interesting part was the question by a reporter who apparently couldn't do the simple math noted above and asked if the attacks interrupted supplies to our forces. Of course not. But the really interesting part was the general's answer:
No, sir. We have prepositioned supplies at key GS hubs to prevent this to occur, so whenever we have operations, ongoing operations, we can flex our supplies from different GS hubs at that location. And whenever the enemy is doing something different, we have reserve in site, on specific sites that can assist the forces in that sector.
One of the things about transformation that I have not liked is the idea of just-in-time supply. Since in Desert Storm we had to ship back from the Gulf 90% (I'm going from memory so don't quote me exactly) of what we sent there for the war and which we did not need, the idea arose that we should not have "iron mountains" of supplies. In Iraqi Freedom, we had (again from memory) about 4-days of supplies in Kuwait and relied on new supplies coming in to fuel the invasion. This was fine since we had naval superiority and supplies were not threatened.
But my concern has always been that civilian efficiency is fine as far as it goes, but in the civilian world nobody is shooting at your trucks. For the military, I want inefficient redundancy. In Iraq, we recognize that even if only 3% of convoys are attacked, if the combat units have to have whatever portion of that convoy's cargo was affected right now, we've just caused our side to suffer casualties for failing to have what we need. But we have stockpiled, if not iron mountains, than iron mounds.
Just-in-time sounds great when your balance sheet is calculated in dollars. But when the currency is soldiers' and Marines' lives, I want just-in-case standards.
