MacArthur's Ghost
Logistics and Sustainment for the Pacific Fight
The year is 2030, and World War III has finally arrived. The US, its allies, and China have been slinging missiles, bullet, and bombs at each other every hour of every day for the last few weeks. You’re an American commander dug in in the Northern Philippines, your multi-domain task force has been hunting enemy aircraft and ships quite well. The only problem is that you’re nearly out of ammo. Between yeeting barrages over the horizon at radar contacts and plenty of well-aimed incoming fire hitting your guns, you don’t have much left to stay in the fight. A significant percentage of the US Pacific Fleet is sitting at the bottom of the ocean, and while you’ve killed your fair share of PLA, there’s a whole lot more of them bearing down on your ass faster than reinforcements can arrive. To make matters worse, your own ammo resupply plan is barely hanging on. Aircraft can barely make it onto the airfields before the PLA crater them again, if they survive the incoming anti-aircraft missiles. The few available ships in the US fleet designed to carry your ammo won’t survive for very long against a capable enemy, and are really damn slow. Your soldiers are running low on fresh water and food, and casualties are mounting. You’re not sure how much longer you’ll be effective in combat. Somehow more than 80 years after his infamous retreat, you must consider a fate so very reminiscent of General MacArthur’s forces. How did this go so wrong, so fast?
At its peak, it has been estimated Ukraine fired tens of thousands of artillery shells per day. In order to sustain this tempo, the UA was able to call upon a portion of NATO’s shell reserves as well as additional production that ramped up after the war broke out. The Russians fired a similar number per day at their height, and burned through so much of their stock that they began making drug deals with the North Koreans to support their artillery barrages. This is to say nothing of the millions upon millions of rounds of small arms munitions, food, water, medical supplies, and other materiel expended day to day on the front lines. Both sides have employed a variety of means to disrupt logistics supply chains from targeted missile strikes on supply depots and drone attacks on critical infrastructure, to sabotage campaigns ranging from the Russian Far East to Western Europe. Roads, rail lines, ships, and planes compose a warfighting conveyor belt that stretches thousands of miles and collides in Eastern Ukraine every hour of every day. A war in the Pacific would be no such fair fight.
There is no series of highways and rail lines from Oahu to Taipei. There are shipping lanes, which are far more treacherous than driving through the relatively safe Polish or German countryside these days. There are few runways on Taiwan capable of handling the kind of air bridge necessary to sustain the fight, presumably all of which would be cratered in a PLA opening salvo. In Japan and the Philippines, we have plenty more air and sea ports, but still face the problems of infrastructure disruption, blockade, and swarms of PLA missiles and sensors from which we must hide, disrupt, kill, or deceive in order to survive.
To make matters worse, that which we fail to defeat will inevitably come screaming at our forces as they make their way to the front lines. It takes a lot of ships and aircraft to move the necessary equipment and personnel into theater. It took 73 C-17 cargo aircraft flights to move a single Patriot (anti-air and anti-missile) battalion in a non-contested environment recently. There’s only about 220 C-17s in the US inventory total (and that’s assuming all are functioning at a given time.) A single Patriot battalion in the Pacific, at outbreak of war, buys us only so much time.
The United States military is not designed to wage a far-reaching, military campaign of attrition against a peer threat in a contested environment. By tradition, the US military is an expeditionary force, and historically, our massive industrial base has allowed us to rapidly scale up production to pivot that expeditionary force into a sustainable mass of firepower. During World War II, the American shipbuilding industry and maritime fleet ensured we could get everything we needed *in quantity* anywhere we needed it, even while taking losses en route. As aircraft became more capable of strategic lift and the US shipbuilding industry declined in the second half of the Cold War, we leaned more and more on being able to get things somewhere *quickly* and after the end of the Cold War, what was left of our maritime fleet and shipbuilding industry really started to collapse. Without a peer and imminent threat capable of shooting down our aircraft, we leaned even harder on our aircraft. Now the problem is the opposite: our aircraft (while still very capable) face a significant threat from a peer, but we don’t have enough aircraft or ships to get the job done. Sure, we can put a Burger King anywhere in the world inside of a week, but if you want to get ammo to the Army and Marine Corps in the 1st Island Chain or the Navy when it runs out of missiles in open waters, the only thing that BK capability will help you with is eating the pain away of a lot of dead Americans.
We have an obsession with lethality. Don’t get me wrong, a lethal military is good when you have to face down the bad guys, but it’s only as good as having the ammo to get the job done. In the last 30 years, we have allowed the logistics capabilities and capacity required to support a fight against a peer threat (China/Russia) to atrophy. And despite countless quotes by famous military figures from Napoleon to Ike to Sun Tzu, logistics is still the red-headed stepchild of military planning. I’ve written before about the necessity to fund and expand the military industrial base to ensure we can fight a Pacific war, but being able to deliver missiles to the right place, at the right time, in quantity, in spite of the enemy’s best efforts to kill you is just as important to deterrence as having the missiles in the first place. If the enemy thinks it can choke you out of the fight, starve your troops on the ground and run your magazines dry, it will gladly do so before grinding its own forces away on the front lines. We strangled the Confederacy with the “Anaconda plan”, the Brits kept the Germans surface fleet mostly bottled up in both world wars, the German U-boats tried to cut Britain off from American aid in the Atlantic and now we and our allies face the same challenge in the Pacific against the PLA Navy. The fact that I’ve heard multiple people use the phrase “getting Guadalcanal’d” to describe what might happen to them is not very encouraging.
Let me break down exactly why this is so bad for us: the USAF and Navy don’t have enough refueling tankers to support air operations in the Pacific. The USAF doesn’t have enough transport aircraft (like those C-17s) to move enough stuff fast enough, especially once you consider possible combat losses. The boats that the Army and Navy have to support intra-theater lift are either nonexistent, undermanned, rusting away, or incapable of defending themselves. If we push too many munitions forward before the war, we risk losing them in a first strike. If we distribute them to mitigate risk, we invite new risk in being unable to mass and redistribute them quickly enough. Yes we do have some civilian aircraft we can call up to support operations (like FedEx), but those take time and aren’t very survivable. Our civilian maritime capacity is incredibly sad, to say the least. In the last few years we have ramped up production of new munitions, but that only solves part of the problem. If we can’t get those munitions to the fight, they’re useless. Some have taken to saying that “industrial capacity is deterrence” but that only matters if you can apply that capacity at the right time, in the right place, with the right people aiming it down range.
So what can we actually do?
Well, I’m sorry to disappoint, but there is no quick fix solution here. There is no single system you can build that solves every part of the Pacific logistics equation. What you actually need is a (funded) Replicator-scale initiative for Joint logistics.
So you need quite a few new or expanded Congressional line items (which makes no one happy in this environment).
First, think of a traditional global transportation enterprise. You have a factory somewhere that makes the widget, this widget is then transported by truck or rail to a port of embarkation (a maritime or airport). From there, a ship or plane take it to another hub, where it is once again put on a truck or train to a distribution center, and then finally delivered to its final destination (likely by truck). If I am an international commercial enterprise, I can’t just buy a fleet of 737s and be done with it. I need to either buy, build, or contract our those additional services. And I have to ensure they are all coordinated, likely down to the hour, if not minute. Perhaps I need to invest in security to protect my packages (train robberies in the US are up 40% this past year), or maybe a bridge collapsed and now my ships have to sit outside the port burning money waiting for the transit route to clear and I have to decide when to divert them to another port to prevent a serious loss of income. What if there’s suddenly a new surge in demand for additional product? Well, then I need a reserve fleet to pick up the slack. And this isn’t just about transport, it’s about capacity to resupply under fire and that takes training, a lot of it.
I would argue that from the Joint Force perspective there are five primary groups/lines of effort that need to be accelerated in order to ensure we can actually get to and sustain the fight in the Pacific:
Army and Navy transport watercraft: These are the actual craft transporting material, weapons, and sometimes people to the front lines. Despite the oft-repeated quote about the “Army having more boats than the Navy” (many of these belong to the Corps of Engineers for domestic work and are less than helpful in sustainment), the watercraft the Army and Navy have to get stuff to the fight are mostly old, poorly protected, slow, and unfit for a peer fight. The Gaza Pier debacle highlights this more than anything I can write by myself.
Aerial lift: C-17s and C-130s are amazing machines, and we need more of them. But production lines can only be accelerated so much, and pilots produced only so quickly. Additional medium-range, probably autonomous, lift that is cheaper to produce is required to distribute and mass forces around the island chains and limit C-17 and C-130 exposure to enemy fire. Vertical lift (helicopters) helps some, but only if you can build enough cheaply (and if you can get them in theater). Remember, pilots take a long time to train. Imagine the big birds getting personnel and equipment into theater, and then smaller craft moving that stuff from major hubs to smaller facilities, just like our imagined business. As for aerial refueling, the most recent programs have been plagued by issues. We keep searching for a singular solution when what we need is to invest in multiple classes of tankers at once, in order to cover gaps and ensure we can keep birds in the air even after taking significant losses.
Oilers: This is a catch-all term for the vessels that refuel and rearm the Navy’s gray hulls at sea. The present set of vessels costs a lot of money, and there certainly aren’t enough to go around in a high end fight. More than anything, this is a problem of shipbuilding.
Submarine tenders: We’ve only got two and we’ve got a lot more submarines than that. You can see the obvious problem here if we lose even one due to maintenance or a missile.
VLS-Reloaders: Yes, the Navy cannot currently reload missiles at sea. Yes, that’s an insane problem to have ignored for *checks notes* 30 years. Yes, we are working on it. Yes, again, it’s insane it took this long. If we don’t have these, the ships have to go back to either ports in the Pacific that can be under fire by enemy missiles or all the way back to Hawaii. You can’t hold control of the sea lanes if you have to keep running back home for missiles. Again, this is insane.
Conclusion: So right now, we can’t get our forces to the fight in quantity, the transport we do have isn’t numerous or survivable enough, and can’t be easily replaced if we lose it. We don’t have enough vessels to supply our forces at sea or on land during the fight. All the missiles we buy, warbots we build, and troops we train mean nothing if they can’t get to the fight or if they run out of ammo mid-fight. No one is actually stopping us from doing this. There is no escalatory concern about building another C-17 or some transport boats. Hell, it’s good work for a struggling economy right now. This is a multi-decade failure that we now have uh *looks at the ticking clock* not much time to remediate. America is a global and historical logistics icon, we should be able to get this done.
Build the logistics enterprise, win the war.
If you would like to read more about the future of US-China conflict, the importance of logistics, or what happens when we unilaterally disarm from the AI arms race, check out my novel, EX SUPRA. It’s all about the world after the fall of Taiwan, an isolationist and hyper-partisan America, and World War III. It was nominated for a Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel and there’s a sequel in the works! If you have any suggestions for topics for future newsletters, please send them my way on BlueSky @tonystark.bsky.social. And don’t forget to subscribe!