U.S. Military Transportation

Recent closure or loss of overseas bases and assets now requires a greater dependence on deploying forces from the continental United States (CONUS), thus requiring efficient deployment planning. At the same time, widely scattered and increasingly numerous low-scale operations result in a greater pace of military deployments than ever before. Deploying from home station directly into theaters together with resupply and sustainment presents a highly complicated problem in military logistics that demands the application of appropriate technologies. In the civilian world, technology and advanced logistics concepts have greatly increased transportation efficiency and capacity. The Department of Defense's (DoD's) theater commanders in chief (CINCs) have recognized the emergence of the new technologies and now routinely demand constant updates and estimates on when the " forces will close. " Furthermore, the Wal-Mart approach to resupply and sustainment is becoming the norm. In most military operations, early deployment cargo moves on military assets. Although these early movements may account for only a small portion of the total, they are often the most critical. Still, most military cargo, personnel, and war-fighting assets now move on commercial assets. For example, more than 95 percent of the equipment and cargo shipped in Desert Shield and Desert Storm moved on commercial carriers. Because of this, DoD instituted agreements with commercial carriers to ensure asset availability when needed. However, in an era of increasing need for military augmentation, competitive pressures have reduced civilian excess capacity and increased the need for closer coordination between the military and civilian carriers. Civilian-sector efficiency improvements result from the rapidly increasing use of technology to identify, track, and quickly locate cargo and shipments. For example, global positioning systems are now commonplace in the commercial trucking industry. The military sector needs to adopt these commercial successes more rapidly. Many disciplines are available to improve the planning and execution of military deployments, such as information technology and computers; communications; network flow models; operations research and logistics science; design of lift assets; demand reduction; and vehicle scheduling, routing, and monitoring. Many military transportation problems are being addressed by commercial companies or are the subject of research in universities and national laboratories. Because of the military's conservative nature, the research community has the lead in developing and