Let's not overlook the obvious. It isn’t just about how the military buys things. It’s about how the military does things, and I’m talking about logistics.

The Air Force released a report yesterday, called “America’s Air Force: A Call to the Future.”

Now, let’s set the stage a bit.  The Air Force is the military service most reliant on expensive, high tech weapons systems.  While these systems are expensive to buy, they are even more expensive to keep running.  Typically, two-thirds of weapons systems costs across the life cycle are in the operation and sustainment of those systems, not the purchase.

That two-thirds is logistics . . . an expansive view of logistics, how we field, maintain, and sustain systems, but logistics nonetheless.

According to the New York Times, the Air Force report makes the point that “the country may soon be unable to afford the military it has without making significant changes to the way it does business.”

The constraint of austerity can be a great forcing function, but the Air Force needs to be careful not to put blinders on.  Doing business isn’t just about how the Air Force buys things.  It includes how the Air Force does things.

The Times quotes Maj. Gen. David W. Allvin, one of the authors of the report, “To boil this down, we have to buy things very differently and develop and employ our people differently.  We have to behave more like an innovative 21st-century company.”

Let’s talk about that.  Let’s talk about how the Air Force can behave like an innovative 21st-century company.  Let’s foot stomp that an innovative company pays attention to all of the issues that matter, including the two-thirds of the pie that is consuming weapons systems budgets, not just the one-third of the budget that goes to the acquisition of new systems.

So, a piece of advice to services providers in the defense business:  if you want to make some money in a time of austerity and declining budgets, show the Air Force how to be smarter in what it does with the two-thirds of the weapons systems life cycle budget that isn’t acquisition.

Follow the money, not the headlines.  Like the bank robber Willie Sutton said, “Go where the money is...and go there often.”

And let’s see how the Air Force reacts.

Opinions, anyone?

There really is a bear on the loose

Libya is spinning out of control, and the Levant, which includes Syria, Israel and the Gaza Strip, is a mess.  This has bled over the border into Iraq, and who knows what Iran, the next country over, is going to do.  Next door to Iran, Afghanistan’s election victor has not been declared, so the specter of a failed government and a failing state haunts us, and we just don’t know if Pakistan is a friend or a foe. 

And let’s not forget Ukraine, just to the north.

I’m not going to make a case on how we have vital national interests in this swirl – if you don’t already know that you should go read a couple of books instead of reading my blog -but despite these interests the West, and the United States in particular, remain frozen. 

Pundits rail, talking heads foam at the mouth, neoconservatives have taken to the airwaves again, and Senator McCain wants us to adopt a more aggressive posture in lots of places.

Still, nothing happens.  Polls show that the American people seem to agree with the lack of action, and the chattering class should reflect on opinion.  Perhaps we’re a lot smarter than the smart people think we are.

There is indeed a bear on the loose, only it’s not the President wandering around in a Denver pool hall.  It is a positively evil man named Vladimir Putin.  His fingers are in all of this.  So, why not take on the bear?  We are a superpower, aren't we?

We still have thousands of troops in Afghanistan, and the only ground routes out transit Russia, Iran, or Pakistan.  We can’t go through Iran, we can’t trust Pakistan because they’ve closed the border to us not that long ago, so we can’t afford to anger Putin.

In 1948, along with Brits we did the Berlin Airlift to bring food and coal to West Berlin to break the blockade.  Today, it’s much easier for Putin to drop a blockade across most of Europe, not just Berlin, on energy, and he doesn’t have to use any troops.  He just shuts off the gas pipeline.  Once again, we can’t afford to anger Putin.

We may think we won the space race decades ago, but somehow we conceded the high ground and we are now vulnerable.  Russia builds the rocket engines that deliver U.S. military satellites into space.  According to DoD Buzz, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin threatened in May to cut off sales of the RD-180 engines following the announcement of sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S, and the threat is still hanging over our head.  We have something like a dozen of these engines in stock, and rely on Russia to keep the flow going.

So, perhaps the American people are pretty shrewd.

While it may seem like a good idea to ask Vladimir to step out into the parking lot an old-fashioned American roadhouse whupping, that’s a fight that may cost us dearly.  The logistics tail is wagging the dog, at a strategic level.  We may not like it, but we have to accept reality, even when it stinks.  That’s what logisticians do.

It’s no different from what happens to us in our day-to-day work.  We may not like the new dimensional rules that are coming down for freight rates, but we can’t fight it in the near term.  In the long term options are infinite, but people like us are realists and we live in the here and now.

Mark Twain once said, ““God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”  It seems that the American people have.  Now we can only hope that the politicians and pundits do the same.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

I was just looking at the 2014 “Supply Chain Top 25” for 2014, published by Gartner, Inc., for the 10^th straight year.  It's a pretty good list, and I do make a point of checking it out every year.

The names at the top of the list are no surprise.  “The top five-ranked organizations in 2014 include four that topped the list last year — Apple, McDonald's, Amazon and Unilever — plus another familiar leader, P&G.”

Take a moment to look at all of the names in the Top 25, and think about what you don’t see.

Where are the Aerospace and Defense companies?  There isn’t single one on the list.  Those of us who consider ourselves military logisticians ought to be ashamed of ourselves.

I think this is what Spain must have felt like at the World Cup.