These days, John has been working on former Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel George Thorpe's book "Theoretical Logistics." Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 In John's view, although the content of this work on military logistics theory published in 1917 is a bit "old-fashioned", it is still very useful for improving the current logistics management of the US Army.

John believes that the most valuable part of this book is not its series of expositions on the army's logistics organization system, leadership structure, management methods, and how to prepare for war in peacetime and how to carry out production mobilization in wartime, but because it defines logistics for the first time, together with strategy and tactics, as the three major branches of war science in the industrial era.

George Thorpe makes an interesting analogy in the book, the war in the industrial age is like a Broadway musical, the strategy is the plot setting, the tactics are the roles played by the actors, and the logistics are a series of stage settings such as choreography, lighting, costumes, and props. No matter which of these three has problems, it is impossible to achieve a good "performance" effect.

Unfortunately, as far as John knows, this theoretical work, which has been published for more than 20 years, is still relatively cutting-edge and niche reading at the moment, and these theories of Mr. Thorpe have not received widespread attention from the military's top brass.

Historically, the book was not discovered and valued by researchers at the U.S. Naval Academy until after the end of the war in 1945, and was generally accepted by military circles in 1959. Later generations once lamented when talking about this book that if Mr. Thorpe's theory had received due attention in time, the United States would have saved at least nearly $10 billion in military spending during World War II.

Of course, for a "visionary" man like John, many of George Thorpe's ideas are not new at all, and in some places are even too old-fashioned. But it is precisely because it is "old-fashioned" that it is closer to the current background of the times, which is what John urgently needs.

In John's previous life, the mode of warfare had already evolved from C2 warfare (command and management) in the agricultural era and C3 warfare (in charge of communications) in the industrial age to C4 warfare (in charge of communication and information) in the information age. Military logistics management has also entered the era of precision logistics with the construction of digital troops.

However, there is no barcode, MIFARE smart card, radio frequency identification technology (RFID) for material identification and cataloguing, no global positioning technology (GPS) and geographic information system (GIS) to track and locate items, no optical fiber, short-wave, microwave transmission technology to transmit information in a timely manner, and no Internet, cloud computing and big data to summarize and analyze massive information, what does John use to build the Internet of Things and achieve accurate logistics.

Therefore, John does not have much experience from later generations to draw on, but it is not as useful to him as the book "Theoretical Logistics". After presenting the report on the inspection of Pittsburgh's logistics to Major General Bull, John spent another week or so pondering over how to improve the current logistics management of the US Army.

After consulting with Martin, Crawford, and others, John finally came up with a few workable solutions.

First of all, the first is to achieve full asset transparency. At present, the information on the army's logistics materials is very opaque, and the accounts are messy and unsystematic. The War Department sometimes does not even know which troops, which logistics warehouses, and what supplies are in reserve. It is often necessary to send people to the field to find out, as was the case with John's trip to Pittsburgh to inspect the camp's material stockpile.

The Pittsburgh Supplementary Training Camp is still a newly established unit, and the logistical situation is relatively easy to grasp. If old bases with a long history like Fort Lewis and Fort Benning have accumulated decades of confused accounts, who can figure it out. Many supplies have even been backlogged in warehouses for decades without anyone knowing.

Therefore, it is very important to have a timely and accurate understanding of the region, storage and movement status of military supplies, and the quality of military supplies, as well as to grasp which units hold which military supplies in order to improve the current logistical situation of the army. This can only be achieved through full asset transparency.

This also has the advantage of effectively avoiding corruption and waste, reducing the inventory ratio of military materials in the national defense system, improving the efficiency of logistics operations, and thus reducing the cost of logistics supply.

However, it is not easy to achieve asset transparency, not only to build a strategic module in the rear, but also to timely and accurately grasp the production and reserve of domestic war materials, and to understand the time of loading and departure at the port and the time of arrival in the war zone. It is also necessary to build supporting campaign modules and tactical modules at the front, and understand the overall personnel and material deployment in the theater, the situation of the stations, highways, railways, ports, and airports that can be used, and the specific travel positions and material allocation of the supply and support detachments on the front line.

Although this will greatly increase the difficulty of logistics management, it can greatly improve the accuracy of material delivery. Historically, the U.S. military's supplies during World War II were sufficient, but the accuracy was really not high. There are often cases where front-line troops, while waiting for ammunition to be delivered from the rear, receive a bunch of auto parts.

John remembers that during the Normandy landings, the rear side had miscalculated the intensity of the front-line landing operations and had put too many weapons and ammunition into the landing zone in the early stage, resulting in a serious shortage of front-line transport vehicles and fuel. At that time, the Allied Command estimated that the daily consumption of a division was 650 tons, but the actual situation was less than 300 tons. As a result, large quantities of supplies were piled up on beaches and ports, and there was no way to transport them, which greatly slowed down the progress of the Allied forces.

If the Allies had achieved asset transparency at that time, the rear would have been able to report the situation in a timely manner and quickly adjust the supply strategy according to the actual situation on the battlefield to avoid this situation.

The second suggestion that John came up with was to change the current supply model of the U.S. Army. At present, the supply mode of the US army is still the traditional supply mode that has been used as early as the time of King Louis XIV of France, with "hoarding supplies" as the core. Today's troops, which move much faster and rely more heavily on logistics than they did in the agricultural era, are clearly outdated.

The reason is simple, no matter how well stocked the material warehouse is, it cannot guarantee that the troops at the front will be able to obtain the required items in a timely and accurate manner. On the contrary, because of the huge inventory, it will occupy a large amount of manpower, increase the pressure on the transportation system, and even affect the mobility of the entire army.

Only by changing this traditional supply model, which has the core objective of providing enough supplies, to a new supply mode with the core goal of shortening the time for supplying materials, can the troops give full play to their combat effectiveness to a greater extent.

John's previous logistics solution to solve the problem of parts supply in the aerospace industry is an application of this dynamic replenishment model. In the end, I believe that the generals in the General Staff know very well in their hearts.

These two are easier said than done. If John's third suggestion is not adopted, his "new logistics theory" will probably end up in the same way as Mr. Thorpe's "Theoretical Logistics".