![]() While operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, we deferred most investments in the modernization of strategic mobility enablers, and much of our current strategic mobility solution set now faces critical near-term age-out and obsolescence challenges. ![]() ![]() Over the 30 years since then, our deployment capability has declined relative to the anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategies and investments made by our adversaries to counteract our long-standing strategic mobility overmatch. It garnered strategic military air and sealift platforms and access to commercial lift capacities, globally prepositioned military equipment and supplies, deployment training exercises, railcars and equipment, deployment infrastructure, management systems, process improvements, and other deployment enablers. Our most recent concerted, top-down directed strategic mobility investment occurred in the 1990s with nearly $50 billion directed by Congress and applied across DOTMLPF-P. Concentrations of forces and supplies create target-rich environments, and our operations must become more and more distributed to increase our survivability and resilience as we move further away from benign operating environments. Our current deployment process must be enhanced, particularly for “early” deployers in contested environments, because it is predictable and inadequate for ever-compressing, adequate military-response timelines and threat capabilities for disruption of our force flow.Īdversaries with advanced (and in some cases superior) weaponry, lethal global reach, and strategic mobility programs and capabilities of their own have combined to force us to acknowledge the contested nature of our military operating environments and adjust our concepts, strategies, plans, and capability development efforts. The nature of the competition through the conflict continuum vis-à-vis China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and even the fight against terrorism, or likely combinations thereof, in an era of great-power competition and conflict demands strategic mobility–enabling processes and capabilities that are different from those we have now. Our recent military successes have been against nation-states that were not capable of global competition or non-state actors with little to no ability to disrupt our strategic mobility capabilities. Growing Critical ChallengesĪt the same time, however, America’s competitors and adversaries have been making their own investments in an effort to offset American strategic mobility overmatch in future armed conflicts. This commitment is demonstrated by the four-star-level, joint United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM), which orchestrates American strategic mobility operations in concert with interagency, intergovernmental, multinational, nongovernmental, and commercial stakeholders. DOD has developed and resourced the necessary strategic mobility–related doctrine, organizations, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities, and policy (DOTMLPF-P) in order to meet the force-flow requirements of geographic combatant commanders in executing their operational war plans. Traditionally, the Department of Defense (DOD) has invested in a set of strategic mobility enablers that can move war-winning levels of combat forces, equipment, and supplies to sustain military operations at the time and place, and for the duration of, our choosing. In concert with the diplomatic, information, and economic instruments of national power, the military helps to implement America’s national security and defense strategies, 1 but success in great-power competition and future conflict will require a reinfusion of innovation and resources. “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”Īmerica’s military instrument of national power has prevailed over those of our adversaries because of an unparalleled ability to project and sustain dominant force levels rapidly around the globe.
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