US Army soldiers from 1-1 Air Defense Artillery Battalion fire a patriot missile during Exercise Talisman Sabre 21 on July 16, 2021, at Camp Growl located in Queensland, Australia. For this year’s exercise, the service is focusing on contested logistics. (US Army photo/Staff Sgt. Malcolm Cohens-Ashley)
Updated on 4/4/2023 at 9:15 am. Although fiscal 2024 budget documents and some Army officials still use the term “Pacific Pathways,” the exercise has been rebranded as “Operation Pathways.” This story has been updated to reflect that change.
Global Force 2023 — Army Futures Command’s recent announcement of a new cross functional team to focus exclusively on “contested logistics” is just the most recent example of the service’s investment in planning for a long-distance fight — like one that could take place across the Pacific.
While some of the key challenges, like the tyranny of distance, are well-known, the Army plans to use this year’s series of Operation Pathways exercises with allies and partners to examine the service’s existing assumptions about prepositioned weapon stockpiles — including floating at sea — and what it will need to do to prepare for a military conflict in which traditional supply lines could become targets.
“When we look at the Indo-Pacific, we are really going to be focused on establishing and setting up, securing [and] staging bases for air and maritime forces,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. “[For] contested logistics, the Army will play a huge role in terms of making sure that the joint force has the supplies that it needs, and many of the new air and missile defense systems that we’re developing are directly designed to deal with the anti-access/area denial threats that China poses.”
The service is now preparing to test out its skill at setting up and staging bases in that region when it participates in Talisman Sabre, a biennial exercise with Australia and billed as a cornerstone of Operation Pathways. Although that event is now not set to occur until the July and August timeframe, during an interview with Breaking Defense on Tuesday, 8th Theater Sustainment Command Maj. Gen. Jered Helwig previewed plans and early observations.
“The scenario is going to be about building capability in austere conditions, so we’ll actually do joint logistics over-the-shore operations,” Helwig told Breaking Defense.
The operation centers around a combined, joint theater sustainment command run by Australian and US military joint force logisticians overseeing a host of activities.
For example, the US Army plans to test out its ability to deploy weapons, like rolling M1 Abrams tanks onto Australia’s sandy beaches and ensuring they don’t get stuck. The service is also eyeing a joint petroleum over-the-shore exercise where soldiers will lay five kilometers-worth (over three miles) of pipe to move fuel from the waterline up to an airfield.
“We’re already learning a ton about what the future of army prepositioned stock should look like,” Helwig said, as many of the assets involved will be pulled from equipment already held in the region, including some waiting in ships.
The Agricultural Hurdle
For Talisman Sabre, the service is pulling equipment from Army Prepositioned Stock (APS) 3, also known as an APS afloat, that consists of seven ships chock full of equipment for European, Indo-Pacific and Middle Eastern theaters. Those ships are continuously sailing around so that anyone outside the US military, “you never quite know quite where it is,” Helwig explained. These kinds of ships, the Army says, house “complete equipment sets, including spare parts, that are strategically placed across the globe, ready for use should the need arise.”
For the exercise, the plan is to use five unit sets worth of equipment, which is basically about a third of one ship.
But it’s not as easy as simply pulling the ship up to a pier offloading the weapons — for a fairly surprising reason: Australia’s strict agricultural inspection guidelines require the inspection of all military equipment entering the country for pests, meaning the service has been prepping for months.
When it comes to those US Army Abrams tanks and other equipment from APS 3, the service dropped those unit sets off in Hawaii more than four months ago and has been deep cleaning them ever since. They will then be loaded back onto the ship with an agricultural inspector onboard outfitted with pesticides standing guard until they arrive down under. It’s an ecological precaution for which there doesn’t seem to be an exception.
“If we went to war, would [Australia] really make us do it? And we [vehemently] think, ‘Yes.’ We’ve seen this in Europe,” the two-star general added.
But largely going through this process, he explained, could help the service decide the best way to adjust its stockpiles around the globe.
“We have to learn what it takes, and allow the Army to make decisions about APS,” he later added. “Do you keep it all afloat? Do you maybe look at leaving some of it in Australia because it’s so hard to get it in there in the first place?”
Army Getting In The Ship Business
In addition to testing out assumptions during global exercises, the Army wants to improve its process for drawing up requirements and acquiring new assets to help move weapons, troops and supplies around on the battlefield.
While it is not clear when the Army’s new contested logistics CFT will be up and running in Huntsville, Ala., the service’s evolving requirements and acquisition processes have enabled Helwig to push for two capabilities he views as key enablers in the Indo-Pacific region: a Maneuver Support Vessel-Light and a -Heavy to transport people and equipment over waters in the region.
Work on the smaller 117-foot RSV-L program is underway after Vigor, LLC, a marine fabrication facility in Vancouver, secured the 10-year contract in 2017 for vessel development and the production of up to 36 of the new watercraft.
“The MSV-L allows us to get into very austere locations… [but] they can’t self-deploy, they can’t move across the ocean by themselves,” Helwig said.
“But they give us a lot of good capabilities. For example, a place like Palau has [hundreds] of islands that make up the country. You don’t need a big ship [to move between the islands] and in fact, you don’t want a big ship because of the weight and the port infrastructure there,” he added. “So, the smaller boats give us those capabilities to do that.”
Although the smaller vessels are great for shorter distances he described, the Army is eyeing a competition for a MSV-H to replace legacy vessels like the Landing Craft Medium and Logistic support Vessel.
“We’re trying to replace… two different types of ships,” Helwig said. “They’re designed to go over the ocean, so they greatly expand our reach.”
Instead of traveling shorter distances between Palau’s islands, the MSV-H is envisioned for the open waters and moving from Guam to Palau.
Helwig said that he and other stakeholders were able to use the Army’s Project Convergence 2022 to make the case for the MSV-H by showing service leaders what current vessels could and could not do.
“That’s part of the requirements generation, we work hand in hand with [the Combined Arms Support Command] on describing the requirements we have in the field, both in terms of port depth [and] speed we think that the vessel needs to go to be effective, given the distances we have to travel in our region,” he explained.
Wolfgang Petermann, the project manager for transportation systems within the program executive officer for Combat Support & Combat Service Support, told reporters in early March that that larger vessel may be up to 400 feet in length, reach a speed of 18 knots while carrying up to 175 soldiers and their equipment payloads right up to shore. If the Army’s plan is approved, he noted that the service may issue a white paper between July and September this year. Then, based on feedback, in early 2024 select three shipyards to participate in a virtual prototyping competition.
Although Helwig is not on the acquisition side of the house, he made one additional suggestion: get a buy-in from Australians on this program.
“We’ve talked to Australia, who’s also looking to build a boat. How do we partner and make this more interoperable, so that maybe we’re able to maintain each other’s boats?” he said. “From a user perspective, this is very attractive to us, to not have to build our own supply chain.”
