Perspective_
U.S. forces must be prepared to operate across multiple theaters at once, and those theaters can be anywhere around the globe. But battles are not won at the point of contact alone. Every operation, deterrence or combat, depends on the ability to move people, sustain equipment, and maintain readiness under pressure. Our adversaries understand this reality as clearly as we do, and they are contesting those systems that get us to the battlefield and keep us in the fight.
Overcoming contested logistics, especially in an era of increasingly centralized systems, requires more than incremental improvements to legacy systems. It demands a fundamental shift toward dispersed, agile logistics architectures that are built to survive disruption, deny adversaries leverage, and keep the force operational when conditions are disadvantageous.
The reality of what’s at risk
Decentralization is crucial because modern logistics is deeply entwined with the commercial, cyber, space, and information domains. Ports, power grids, maintenance depots, enterprise systems, and satellite-enabled communications are all part of the logistics ecosystem, in addition to the traditional military facilities and resources. That interconnectedness creates efficiency in peacetime, but it also creates exposure. Cybercriminals and state actors exploit those seams every day, probing for ways to disrupt readiness, delay response, and undermine confidence without triggering a conventional military response.
In conflict, those same techniques scale rapidly. Both sustainment forces and infrastructure become priority targets, and secure rear areas disappear. Networks are degraded, data is corrupted, and communications are intermittent. Units are delayed or denied movement. The goal is not simply to slow logistics, but to break the force’s ability to coordinate, decide, and sustain momentum.
This is the environment sustainment leaders must plan for, and then the question becomes how these systems will function in spite of disruption at scale.
Turning vulnerability into advantage
The answer in these scenarios is to out-design and out-adapt our adversaries. That requires a whole-of-government approach focused on resilience, deterrence, and rapid recovery, anchored by deliberate decentralization.
It starts with establishing redundant and distributed logistics networks, both physical and digital. By reducing single points of failure, we complicate adversary targeting and blunt the impact of early or sustained attacks while, at the same time, ensuring there’s a strategy in place for maintaining U.S. operations. Crucial to outmaneuvering contested logistics will be the use of modular, mission-tailored ecosystems that integrate a curated, interoperable, scalable tech stack. These systems will need to enable rapid, informed decisions while being adaptable to specific mission requirements, which can include data integration and visualization, AI-enabled decision support, or secure communications. By enabling real-time data flow across systems, cross-domain integration, and intuitive interfaces, this approach ensures operators can make faster, more informed decisions in dynamic environments, without the giant bullseye centralized systems create. Focusing on resilience shifts the calculus from trying to figure out how to avoid disruption to having a plan for operating through it.
Once dispersed systems are in place, linked, and secured, advanced analytics can turn that dispersion into advantage. Predictive logistics, powered by artificial intelligence and advanced modeling, simulation, and analysis, allows planners to anticipate demand, prioritize maintenance, and—crucially—dynamically route supplies around contested areas.
However, traditional asset-tracking solutions often rely on fragmented systems, manual processes, and intermittent tracking that can’t keep pace with today’s operational demand. Agencies need a secure, scalable, long-lasting solution that automates data capture and operates across contested and disconnected environments, providing access to critical information for mission readiness. Sensor-enabled logistics provides real-time visibility into equipment and materiel, even when communications are degraded. Providing this visibility to forward-deployed forces can ensure rapid resupply, asset accountability, and operational agility.
Together, these capabilities allow leaders to make informed decisions and identify and harness the right resources when time, data, and certainty are all constrained.
Finally, our international alliances can be leveraged as the literal embodiment of decentralization. Interoperable sustainment, shared maintenance capacity, pre-positioned stocks, and co-sustainment frameworks increase logistics depth and expand options. Additionally, a distributed sustainment posture shared among allies serves as a deterrent, signaling that no single node can be fully neutralized, no nation among our allies can be isolated, and, ultimately, disruption will not yield advantage.
A logistics system built to fight
Adversaries will contest the United States’ ability to move and sustain our forces across every domain. The outcome will not hinge on a single platform or technology, but on whether logistics is treated as a decisive warfighting capability─a dispersed, adaptable, and survivable system.
When logistics is designed for resilience rather than efficiency alone, it becomes a source of operational advantage. It preserves freedom of action, sustains tempo, and gives commanders options when the environment is hostile and the margin for error is thin. In a contested environment, logistics is not a support function. It is how the force stays in the fight and how the mission succeeds.