Moving Pieces on the Chessboard: Strategy and Logistics in the Indo-Pacific

Andrew Schwartz: Welcome to The Asia Chessboard, the podcast that examines geopolitical dynamics in Asia and takes an inside look at the making of grand strategy. I'm Andrew Schwartz at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Hannah Fodale: For the 50th episode of The Asia Chessboard. Mike is joined by David Berteau, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness, to discuss the intersection of strategy and logistics in the Indo-Pacific. How do we get US forces into the region? And once they are there, how do we sustain them? How should the US incorporate allies and partners into logistics planning? These questions of how to implement US-Asia strategy are important to consider given the current security environment and China challenge.

Michael Green: Welcome back to The Asia Chessboard. This is our 50th episode. It's hard to believe, and to go back to fundamentals of strategy in Asia and the Indo-Pacific, we're going to talk about not strategy, but logistics. My guest can tell me whether it was general Omar Bradley or the Commandant of the Marine Corps Barrow who had the famous line "Amateurs do strategy," that'd be me, "Professionals do logistics." That'd be our guest, David Berteau. David is the leader of the Professional Services Council, which he'll explain, was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Logistics and Materiel Readiness. And my colleague at CSIS, where we did some major studies on strategy in the Indo-Pacific that married, we think, strategy and logistics. So David, welcome to The Asia Chessboard.

David Berteau: Thank you, Michael. And it's really great to be here. And what a timely topic for us to be discussing here. Bob Barrow actually said something called "We've got more fight than we have ferry." Which focused on the lift, the ability to get the forces there. The logical extension of that is once you get the forces there, how do you keep them there? How do you keep them fed and with fuel and with ammunition and with supplies and that's where logistics comes into play.

Michael Green: And a problem we still have. So we'll come back to that. So let's start with you, David, how did a good boy from Louisiana end up working on logistics in the Pacific? And I know you've had some pretty interesting mentors impressed over the years, but how'd you get into this business?

David Berteau: Well, it's a really interesting question because as we look at the threats on the Pacific now, and you're seeing emerging conversations, that sort of toy with the idea of maybe we're going to fall into a cold war with China. Right? And I think you and I have discussed separately how relevant that comparison is and how useful those tactics might be. But I got into this business because of the real Cold War, The Cold War with the Soviet Union and with the idea that the only thing that really mattered, it didn't really matter what your cause was in terms of society. If we had a global thermonuclear war, everything else kind of paled in comparison to that issue, right? So that's how I got into national security and the defense business. And I came to Washington originally when Jimmy Carter was president. Well, I came to Washington originally to demonstrate against Vietnam and get tear gassed but that was not a particularly relevant part of the current conversation.

David Berteau: From a professional career point of view, I came to Washington at the time of Jimmy Carter. I ended up working in the Reagan Pentagon for the entire time that Cap Weinberger and Frank Carlucci ran it. Stayed in the Pentagon when Dick Cheney was the Secretary. Stayed on for a year under Les Aspin when he became Secretary.

David Berteau: And as a result of that, at the front end of that, very much focused on how do we maintain our position during The Cold War? And then how do we deal with the success that we had in The Cold War? Now, 30 years later, in fact, we find ourselves on the cusp of perhaps reengaging a similar kind of a dynamic. So it's almost as if we come full circle. Along the way I sort of had the idea that China didn't matter. And you'll remember, because you've been at this a long time, for every decade there was, "Oh, China's coming, China's coming, China's coming." And it never actually got here. And then all of a sudden, in fact it was when we did our study, that was the first time I had really focused on China in more than a decade. And it turns out they were no longer coming. They were here, so that's how we got into it.

Michael Green: So you came to Washington as an anti-Vietnam War protester and then became part of the deepest state part of the Pentagon in the think tank role. What happened?

David Berteau: Well, let me tell you what I realized was that the people who were the most committed to preventing global thermonuclear actually worked inside the government. They worked in The White House, they worked in the States Department. You remember the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. I worked for Ron Lehman. I worked for Richard Pearl. These are people who were committed to as Reagan called it "Peace through strength," and when you realize that the people who are most committed to not having a global thermonuclear war, those are ones you want to join and you want to align forces with them. When I got there what I discovered, and this is how I got into logistics, is that resources drives policy way more than policy drives resources, not withstanding the view of strategists that the reverse is true. And so it turns out that management and budgets, logistics and support, and sustainment are at least as important as the front end strategic piece. And when it comes to execution, probably even more important. So that's how I evolved from the strategy side into the logistics and sustainment side.

Michael Green: And among your mentors and teachers along the way, if I remember right at, the LBJ School at UT, Austin, you studied under Rostow, right?

David Berteau: I did study under Walt Rostow and his wife Elspeth. And actually the class that they were teaching at the time was called The Interaction of Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy in the 20th Century. Now, when I took this class, one fourth of the 20th century hadn't happened yet. So it was a much shorter class than it would be today, but I learned so much from them in terms of three important things. Number one is that individuals can make a difference and the effort you put into it in a professional career, such as you've had and I've had, clearly demonstrates that you can make a difference. You can work at this stuff. And the bureaucracy is not at the point where it's impenetrable and where you can't move it. And the second thing is that it takes an alignment of a lot of people, right? No one person we're not all going to be Winston Churchill. So it's really the collective efforts of the individuals, as well as the individual efforts of the individual to do that. And the third thing that I found was, again, back to the resources drives policy is, you got to figure out how to actually get those resources in and apply them. Implementation and execution matter, at least as much as planning and strategy. So those are the three lessons that I took from Walt Rostow. Those are not his lessons. That's what I took from him.

Michael Green: So Walt Rostow has the image in history, for those who've heard of him, as one of the real hawks who went into the Kennedy administration, along with McNamara and others. And had this operations research sort of scientific approach to applying force against a guerrilla movement in North Vietnam. So people think of him as a hawk that one of the great Asia scholars, I didn't study directly under, but studied under people who studied under him was Lucian Pye from MIT, who famously said, when he heard that his colleague was going to Washington, that he was terrified, but was he a hawk in the classroom?

David Berteau: He was a hawk in the classroom. So I actually took the class in 1977 and it was taped for television. Austin was the first place that had a robust cable TV system, because this is back in the day when VHF and UHF TVs, if you didn't have a UHF TV, you only had channels two through 13. And the only channel live in two through 13 was KLBJ in Austin, Texas. So two networks were relegated to UHF. They invested in a cable system much to their ultimate demise, obviously. So this class was taped for TV and played back. So I took the class to sit in the front row and after every lecture, twice a week, harass Walt Rostow about Vietnam with my questions.

Michael Green: Good for you.

David Berteau: And it didn't take long before the students realized that I was going to do that every class. So nobody else raised their hand when it came time. Any questions now, I'll tell you I didn't budge him one inch, but what he brought in, he brought in speakers. We had Dean Rusk, we had Bob McNamara, we had William Westmoreland. We had Ben Bradlee talking about Watergate. It was a great class. Each week they taped over the previous week's class because videotape was so expensive and there was no data storage system, right? So it's all lost to history, right? So I never changed... I'll tell you, Walt Rostow believed that he did the right thing, that his advice to Kennedy was the right thing, that his advice to Johnson was the right thing. And that ultimately the big problems were in execution, not in strategy and planning, but that's where, again, you get into a different issue, which is how do you beat an enemy that can't lose?

Michael Green: So, a shout out to my friend William Inboden at the Clement Center at UT, Austin, where you went. I think one of the best places to study strategy and state craft in the world. Although I don't know about logistics, I'm not sure if that's what they do. Let's talk about logistics for a sec. So INDOPACOM.

David Berteau: Sure.

Michael Green: The, the Indo-Pacific, what are the features obviously huge ocean, but what are some of the features of logistics when you're supporting a forward presence and alliances in that theater?

David Berteau: So distance is one element of it. And as you recall, it was a bit of a surprise to me. It shouldn't be, because I understand that the world is round, is that it's just as far from north to south in the Pacific, as it is from east to west. And so you not only have the logistics problem from us to there, but from the allies and partners in the region to each other. And so distance is a big piece of it. The second is sources of supply. Where's the stuff coming from and this both the physical parts, but also the human beings that actually have to do the labor and the work there. And there you get into a very interesting dynamic, which is we have, in the US, a tendency to say, "We have to go it alone. We've got to be prepared to support ourselves by ourselves in case nobody else shows up." Because our history says that never happens, but we always plan for it as if it's going to right.

David Berteau: And what we saw... well, in fact, what you and I nine years ago was we had a lot of countries in the region that were more than willing to support us, but we didn't have a framework for that support to take place. And of course, as soon as you start looking at that framework, you then bump into things like Buy America and supply chain issues, et cetera. So that's the second piece of it is the dynamics of who and the third piece of it though, I think is really critical here, which is that the Defense Department does a great job of running war games and scenarios and exercises over and over again, to test out our forces against theirs in a variety of scenarios. But I've done many, many of these over the years, both at the classified and unclassified level.

David Berteau: And the one thing they all do is they assume away, any logistics and sustainment problems, because if you play them for real, it screws up the game and then you don't get to play the game. Right? And that dynamic, I think, is something that the other guys don't fall prey to. They understand their side of it. They understand that you have to look at your strengths and weaknesses. I suspect they understand our strengths and weaknesses at least as well as we admit to ourselves that we do. And I think this is perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome.

Michael Green: It's a curious thing though, when you look at the American way of war, historically, generally we do logistics really well. Ulysses S. Grant in the civil war, Omar Bradley Eisenhower in World War II. Even the Vietnam War as a strategic approach was flawed in its assumptions, but the logistics were incredible. So we do logistics well. That is an American thing. One friend of mine in the Australian Defense Ministry described operating with the US and asking for a truck for the Australian forces in Iraq. And his American counterpart said, "Don't ask us for a truck. We can't do a truck. We can do a thousand trucks, but we can't do a truck." So we do logistics well. But as we look at deterring and dissuading and dealing with, an increasingly capable, China logistics are a challenge for us. I mean, we're going to, for the first time, in a long time, going to have to operate logistics in a theater under significant threat from missile and other strike weapons that the Chinese can throw at us all the way to The Second Island Chain in Guam. Right? So how do we do that? Are we going to have to-

David Berteau: You're right. Historically we've got a great track record there. But we have great track record, when time is on our side, right? And you look at each of the historical examples that you laid out there. It took us months or years to build up to that capability. And of course we also had to be willing as Grant was, as we were in World War I, as we were in World War II, and to a lesser degree as we were in Vietnam, you got to be willing to take a lot of losses, right? So it takes the industrial might of America to generate the stuff. And it takes the human beings to be able to generate the work that comes with it. Will we have the luxury of that time in the event of conflict with China? I don't think so. And so all our historical success both sets us up for an expectation that we can do it again, but the reality, because of the time crunch and the distance and the relationships with the allies and partners and the technical challenges that China proposes, I don't think we've ever overcome those in any kind of a real world scenario that you can point to as a historical precedent.

Michael Green: So what do we do? Do we rethink the strategy? Cause the logistics are so challenging. I mean, I know from working with you, you're not an advocate of pulling back to Hawaii. You're an advocate of full presence.

David Berteau: Absolutely true. Right.

Michael Green: So how do we do logistics differently in this threat envelope to maintain that forward deterrence and forward presence and commitment to allies?

David Berteau: So I think there's several elements that have to come into play here. Number one is you got to recognize reality, right? So you have to actually get a common agreement on what the challenge is. That's not a trivial piece because the way DOD operates each military service creates its own ideas of what its game plan and strategy is in the Asia-Pacific region. And they all like to sort of operate independent of one another. So to recognize the challenge means that you've got to actually both play the war games and look at the joint force in an alliance and partner kind of in the framework and say, "What's our capability now. And where would we fall short?" Right?

David Berteau: The second is you've got to think very hard about what constitutes the force that you're sustaining. If you're making the trade between capability of a platform and long distance sustainability of that platform in combat, you may end up with very different decisions about what the force looks like and how you equip and train and operate that force.

David Berteau: So first you have the common agreement of the problem. Then you have an approach to saying if that's our problem, does our current solution get us there? Or if it doesn't, what are the options? And the options probably have to think much more broadly than just putting more RED HORSE squadrons in for runway repair at Andersen Airfield. Right? So I think that that's the second piece.

David Berteau: The third is the capability of the allies and partners, because they're already there, right? And if we draw on them to provide that capability, especially if we've got an amalgamation of them, it not only strengthens our ability, it does something that you and I have talked about a lot, which is it complicates Chinese thinking. And so the third element then comes into what's the deterrent value of the ability to deliver the logistics and sustainment and support necessary for those forces. I think that deterrent value is very high, but only if it's believable only if it's credible, only if it's demonstrably workable in the face of potential armed attacks and resistance, right?

David Berteau: And then the fourth piece is, is there in fact an ability to draw on more than the military support. So, when I was the Assistant Secretary, one of the questions we looked at is where's the fuel going to come from? And you look at the way the Navy operates it's ships. They tend to plan to draw fuel from their own fuel depots, right? And there's a really nice one in Hawaii and it's gravity fed and it works really well, even if power goes out, you can still refuel the ships. But man, by the time you sail from the South China Sea back to Hawaii with a few tankers and then sail back to the South China Sea, all you've done is spread oil slicks over some part of the Pacific, right? So you got to think differently about that.

David Berteau: We did an exercise and the results are not public or unclassified, but we did an exercise that says, what if you just, we know where all the fuel is on the ships in the ocean at any point in time, right? That's known data in the public data fields. What if you just used all the fuel that was already there, even though you don't own it, this is almost like a Defense Production Act. We jumped the line to take what we need, except on a global scale instead of a domestic scale. Now I'm not suggesting that we're going to use open seas piracy to steal fuel. But, it's a good exercise to say, "What's the capability you have. If you look beyond the assets that you own and control." So all four of those have to come into play.

David Berteau: And then I think there's a fifth piece. I think you actually have to approach the companies that are involved in assembling the equipment and the material that the military depends on and say, "How can you guys do a better job of providing logistics and sustainment and support?" Again, when I became the assistant secretary back at the end of 2014, I called in all of the big companies. And I said, "Tell me how many contracts you've won because you proposed better sustainment and better logistic support capability?" And the answer was, not surprisingly, none. Right? Because at the front end of a weapon system, you are much more worried about building in enhanced capability, building in enhanced capacity, to bring the war fight, right? And so you never win a contract based on logistics and sustainment support. Perhaps it's time we changed that and actually rewarded production and design, particularly at the R&D end with greater supportability, greater ease and sustainment capability, over long distances in the face of contested logistics.

Michael Green: Interesting. The point you made about fuel, not just relying on US Navy's oil replenishment fuel ships, or the Air Force, but looking at what else is out there. We also looked at, of course, runways, there are a lot of runways in the First and Second Island Chain beyond those that are at US or even US and allied Air Force bases.

David Berteau: Right?

Michael Green: Lot of runways. You have access to those runways. You have a lot of divert runways, a lot of options. If you get hit and you complicate the other guys planning because they don't know which runway in which country you're going to have access to. So the engagement with allies partners becomes really critical to be able to have more options. You're talking about more options basically, right?

David Berteau: Right. And we talked about, for instance, with those runways, we talked about prepositioning a little bit of coms and runway repair equipment, and maybe a couple guys, local guys on the hire to keep secure, et cetera. You can do that for a pittance. You could do it at 150, 250 remote airfields all across the Asia-Pacific region. And they never know which one you're going to stand up, until you do it.

Michael Green: So to have logistics that can survive and support the force in this threat envelope, dispersion, redundancy. What about hardening? We have a lot of debates about hardening and by the way, a for those who haven't followed Dave and I, co-chaired a major study, took up seven months of our lives, full time, traveling around the region, looking at the first pivot to Asia. And the distribution of Marines, which was a good strategy, from Okinawa to Guam, Northern Australia, so forth, changing rotations of Marines and the like. The Congress did not understand the logistics. Why are we paying for housing in Guam? And because the strategy did not make sense to them. And our job was to come in, look at it fresh from outside and explain basically that it would work, but a lot of things that had to be done. And one of the things we really grappled with David it was hardening. Do you harden all these air bases, all these logistic hubs, the fuel lines in Guam and all the rest? It's a lot of concrete, we never totally squared that circle. What do you think now?

David Berteau: We didn't square that circle in 2012. And then I think we looked at it again in 2014. And I think you looked at it again after I left maybe in 2016 or 2017. And I think what we've seen evolve is that our ability to harden is about the same as it was then. We don't have a whole lot of new technologies for tripling or quadrupling the protection. The ability of the Chinese to disrupt that hardening is probably quintupled or maybe more in the ensuing nine years. And I suspect they can move faster up that chain of attack capacity than we can move up the chain of defense capacity. Now that doesn't mean you don't harden anything, but I think it means you can't harden everything and expect to get away with it. Because the reality is no matter how much hardening you do, you're still going to have to do runway repair. And it takes a lot longer to repair than it takes to destroy.

Michael Green: One of the things that changed for the better since we did that initial study in 2011, 12. Is that our key allies are willing to do a lot more with us. So in 2015, Japan revised the interpretation of the Peace Constitution and negotiated new defense guidelines with us to allow joint operations in what used to be called Combat Logistic Support basically.

Michael Green: Japan can bring a lot now, legally. Australia has invited us into Northern Australia. And now of course, there's talk again as... we had put in our report as a notional thing, but now there's talk, serious talk of Western Australia and HMAS Stirling and the submarine base and Naval base, there is a hub for us to operate, now that Australia is looking at its own nuclear powered subs and so forth.

Michael Green: So a lot more opportunity with some key allies to do more. But our alliances, as you were saying earlier, our alliances aren't always configured that way. Our planners plan for worst case scenarios, which means don't count on allies. It seems to me, we can't afford to do that anymore. We're going to need to integrate our logistics planning with allies in a way that planners may not like, but that's the only way you can get through this.

David Berteau: I think it's true at two levels. Number one, it's better planning if you do that. Number two is, if you leave them out, they think you're not serious. Right? In fact, you may recall Mike, the conversation we had, I think it was with the Deputy Foreign Minister of Vietnam. And he said, I'm going to summarize, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong in my memory here. He said, about China, we know three things. China is very big. China is right next door. China is not going anywhere.

David Berteau: Now about America. We know two things. You are very big also, but you are not right next door. What we don't know is, are you here or you going away? And I think the signals you send by integrating planning, not just with our key allies and partners, but through them to the second and third tier countries with whom we may never have a formal alliance, but with whom others in that region can have a much more structured alliance. We can expand our reach. You can engage 30 countries around China at some level in this thinking. And it not only gives you a better chance of the sustainment and support you need to have. It gives you the signal sending that says we're not going anywhere. And I think that's vital.

Michael Green: You were saying earlier that defense contracts should include logistics, sustainability as key benchmarks for performance, not just how quickly can get us something that shoots. If we're guilty of not thinking about that. Our allies and partners, Japan and Taiwan, in particular, but also Korea are even more guilty.

David Berteau: Absolutely. The same thing is true in Europe, by the way, where as bad as we are, they're all worse about it. And the reality is future money is not worth near as much as current money is. And so to spend current money on future support, as opposed to spend current money on future capability, that trade off is almost always decided in the case of more capability. I'm not sure though, back to The Cold War mentality, right? So if you look at what we did with the Soviet Union, we clearly invested in more capability because we could never outnumber them. Right? The number of tanks coming through the Fulda Gap was not something that we could ever hope to match, right?

David Berteau: Now with China for years we weren't as worried about outnumbering. Now I'm not so sure about that, right? In fact, even at the difference in the PLA Navy between the time we looked at it in 2012 in the initial study and what the PLA Navy's projected plans are for the next 10 years, we're not going to outnumber them, right? So, that's another aspect of it that comes into play. I think the only way around that is to put a premium on sustainment and support, and it might be not sustainment and support of platforms that are vulnerable to Chinese weaponry, but something else, undersea, remotely piloted or unmanned or whatever the name is for that particular category, cyber, space, hypersonics. There's a lot of areas where the dynamics of capability versus sustainability is not as obviously as it is with a deployed ship or an attack aircraft or bomber.

Michael Green: Is there a way we can incentivize combatant commanders and allies to prioritize logistics and sustainment more? Is this a statutory thing? Does it need to be an NDA amendment to require that plans include more we logistics and sustainment? Is it in the exercises we do with allies? Is it how we do FMS and Farm Military Sales and so forth? How do we incentivize our allies and the combatant commanders in the region to put more logistics, sustainment into the relationships? Cause right now we focus a lot on hardware and so forth.

David Berteau: When there is a requirement for major systems to be approved, to go through the milestone development process at a certain stage, there's a requirement to do a Life-Cycle Sustainment Plan, that says how we're going to sustain this for its life-cycle. Cause you know, 70% of the cost of a weapon system is after it's been fielded. But you don't pay that part upfront. You pay that part at the back end. If you spend 5% upfront to reduce that 70% by a third, you have a huge payoff, but that payoff doesn't occur under the current leaders who are operating inside. That payoff arrives 10, 15, 20 years from now. So the data are there, the requirements are there, but if they're done one weapons system at a time, that doesn't give you what you need to have sustainment as deterrence, because it's pretty easy to see how the accumulative effect of one weapons system at a time is less than the sum of the parts rather than more than the sum of the parts.

David Berteau: And so I think back to the first of all, not only the acknowledgement of the problem, but the definition of the problem. General Hyten, who's about to leave as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave a public speech back in July at the opening of an innovation center, where he actually walked through what had previously been not publicly disclosed results of some exercises that looked at this question. Maybe I'll send you a link to this speech and you can post a link to the each with the podcast, but he came to the conclusion that it made it clear that we were going to lose, right? This was not a surprise. You may recall. Early on in the previous administration, there was an executive order to look at Surge Capacity for weapons systems in the event. And it looked at six particular categories, aircraft and missiles, et cetera, and Executive Order, 13806.

David Berteau: When DOD undertook that study, I went in and I said, "Listen guys, long before you get the first extra F-35 aircraft, you've lost the war because you can't sustain what you have over there now, you know, you really ought to focus on that piece as well." The answer I got was, "We'll do that in phase two." Well we never got to phase two, right? And now we're redoing phase one under the supply chain and the Made in America Executive Orders that this administration has out. We still need to get to phase two.\.

David Berteau: Ultimately though, it's the leadership in the Pentagon that's going to have to decide that. To put it in statute, I think, you'd end up with a report that says, "We looked at it and we found we're fine." Right? Or at least because the solution's set... Listen, frankly, to fix this problem requires a dramatic shift in how we measure our own ability to project forces and to sustain those forces. And particularly to characterize that projection in sustainment as deterrence, it requires a shift in terms of the relationship with the allies and partners as we've already discussed. And it probably requires a big shift in resources. I'll be glad to go into that last one in more detail if you'd like.

Michael Green: So we're integrating more with our allies. Bilateral alliances, like we have with Japan, are moving more collective defense and more serious planning. With Australia we're... AUKUS is the main focus in nuclear powered submarine deal. But the Australians are looking at a sovereign strike system capability to produce cruise missiles and LRASMs and all sorts of strike weapons, in Australia. As we move towards more bilateral integration of our defense industrial bases, our technology development, our planning, our command and control. The hard part in Asia is because we have these bilateral alliances to make it collective. And it seems to me, that as much as anything we do, logistics is one where we would, and sustainment, where we would benefit from more of a, not a bilateral, but a plurilateral, F-35, if we had FACO, final check out assembly plants, or stealth coding capabilities, all our allies could use. But then you have to have Japan and Korea get along. Japan-Australia's easier. Is that realistic? Could we have a logistical integration of our allies in Asia, maybe under the surface?

David Berteau: You know, I think there's some potential there because, as you know way better than I, you've got guys there for whom World War II is still kind of a living memory, they haven't completely let it go yet. It may be that the area of logistics and sustainment and support, you can cooperate, because there's no threat there. If you got better logistics capability than I do, that doesn't matter between and among the countries around China, in the Asia-Pacific region, it matters much more for the force projection capability or the force application capability. That's where the mismatch would come. You might be able to overcome some of those long-term friction points much more easily in the logistics and sustainment side. I think that's an unexplored or under-explored aspect that should really be brought into it here. As we look forward.

Michael Green: It is less threatening. Supporting and sustaining equipment is less threatening than deploying ballistic missiles, for example. So it could be a sort of an integrator.

David Berteau: Nobody's going to get afraid. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think there's another aspect to this. The real complicating factor with China is we can't cut them off the way we cut the Soviet Union off. We've been trying now, since pandemic started to say, "Well, let's loosen our dependence and let's loosen the Globes dependence on China." From the dollar point of view, I think, that dependence has only grown, not loosened, right? I mean, you can find individual pockets where there's been migration of capability and capacity to other countries in the region or elsewhere around the world. But the reality is we have an interconnected global economy that's nowhere near like The Cold War economy. And so I think that when you get into the logistics and sustainment piece, you can potentially bridge that reality. The reality of China as a pure competitor, potentially in a combat arena and the integration of China or the dependency of the global economy on China, both as a market and as a provider. I think the logistics and sustainment potentially is a connecting piece across those seemingly disparate aspects of the dynamic.

David Berteau: Again, under-explored. But it's worth looking at seeing whether you can find ways to do this. That is, engage more of our allies and partners, in developing and having ready that logistics and sustainment capability in a way that supports us, but doesn't create a fortress China kind of a mentality.

David Berteau: There's a big loser in that though. And that is the US domestic organic industrial base. That is the part that's owned by the government and operated by the government. And by this, I mean, largely the maintenance depots that are carefully structured and spread across America. And that has a very strong caucus of congressional members and senators who protect the investment in that. And looking at the history of that, the idea of post-World War II was those depots would give us the capacity to ride out the early stages of a war while America's industrial might shifted from producing trucks to producing tanks.

David Berteau: Two things wrong with that. Number one is they've got at so little Surge Capacity today that they couldn't help us ride out at all. And number two is we can't shift from trucks to tanks anymore because the difference in the production capacity and the production requirements essentially makes it impossible to use the domestic commercial manufacturing capability to produce the kind of war material we need at the scale, we would need to repeat World War II.

Michael Green: But could you not manage the political problem of the depot maintenance caucus if the Australians and the Japanese and the Koreans are paying for their own increase in defense industrial production, logistics and maintenance and sustainment, and we're just providing capacity technology services so they can do it. That would be an easier political problem back in the US and have huge benefit. But they'd have to spend more.

David Berteau: Absolutely.

Michael Green: They'd have to spend more on defense.

David Berteau: Well.

Michael Green: Their allies.

David Berteau: The reality is that, yeah, the reality is demand domestically is so great that if you create your new capacity overseas, it doesn't mean you diminish your capacity domestically. So I think that's a good solution.

Michael Green: If we're not looking to Australia, for example, to be building surface-to-surface and ship-to-ship missiles, LRASMs and Air-to-ground strike weapons in someplace, Brisbane, Adelaide. With Japanese, and Canadian, and British, and American contractors there and access for all of our Air Forces and Navies. If we don't have that up and running in 10 years, I'll be very worried and disappointed because that's an opportunity to integrate our defense industrial bases and our logistics support and sustainment across alliances in what for CSIS called Federated Defense, that was sort of the catchphrase we came up with for that kind of networking of alliances.

David Berteau: And the other thing you can get there is there's a lot of technology potential, of innovation potential to bring to bear here as well. And we don't have a monopoly on innovation. And in fact, the many of the countries you've just named and throughout the Asia-Pacific region, there's an awful lot of innovative technology capability that if you can bring that to bear into this arena, you'll triple your capacity to get essentially have a better capability of deterrence through sustainment.

Michael Green: What are some of the opportunities we mentioned briefly, Perth, HMAS Sterling, Western Australia. And we talked about the integration of logistical support and sustainment and so forth. There are some other things I haven't mentioned that are on your radar, that we should be thinking about in the region.

David Berteau: Well, the one you mentioned in terms sort of standby airfields, right? Is clearly one, but you can actually multiply that out. You can actually have standby defense postures. You can have standby capacity to onload and offload. One of the things we looked at a lot was we moving ammunition from place to place in the Asia-Pacific region. Now when China's reach is beyond The Second Island Chain, it sort of doesn't matter where your ammo is. If it isn't where you're going to need it, you may recall at one point the Marines, this is back probably 25 years ago, they always wanted to have 30 days of supply with their deployed Marines on ships, right? The Marines decided that they were going to go to 60 days of supply. And you look at what the weight and cube requirements are for 60 days of supply versus 30 days of supply. It's phenomenal in fuel, in water, and in ammo. The rest of it's pretty easy to do. So I asked the Marines, "Well, how do you plan to carry 60 days worth of ammo?" He says, "Well, it's really simple. We're just going to miss less often." In other words, 30 days supply will last us 60 days if we don't waste any bullets on missed targets that we miss.

Michael Green: Marksmanship, that's the answer.

David Berteau: I wish it were that simple.

Michael Green: Do you think the global posture views now underway, re-looking where we deploy forces and so forth. Is this logistics piece going to be a big part of it? Do you think?

David Berteau: We saw some early signs that it would be part of the discussion? I think it has faded, now that we have a nominee for the vice chairman, because this really falls to the vice chairman to be the one to drive this. The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs is a place where the requirements of the combatant command comes together with the capability that the services want to provide through the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and the other entities that are in place there to both validate requirements and then to help push those requirements into resources. I don't know whether the new nominee ,where the new nominee comes from in that regard. Typically, and this is a Navy position now, typically the Navy cares a lot about logistics for itself, but this is one that requires you to think beyond one services needs to a much broader, not only US total for joint force requirements, but the integration with the allies and partners as well. That's our best hope. I haven't seen the terms of reference for the Global Posture Study, but I think that's, if it's not there, then we have a much longer road to go down.

Michael Green: You talked about the Navy, but in the Pacific doesn't the Army handle a lot of the logistics?

David Berteau: The Army handles a lot of the logistics, but the Navy doesn't like to depend on the Army. As you know, the Marines don't like to depend on the Army and the Air Force does its own. Right? And so as long as you're actually have four supply chains trying to do together, you're never going to optimize the output. So this may be the fertile ground for increased jointness. We've got a lot of jointness at the communications level. We've got a lot of jointness at the intel sharing level. We've got good planning for jointness at the operations level. It's time for more jointness in the sustainment and logistics level.

Michael Green: When you're facing an adversary, who's getting bigger and you have to do more with less stuff. Jointness is the answer.

David Berteau: Jointness is the answer and being able... A threat that the enemy knows cannot be sustained is not a threat. Time is on their side. Distance is on their side. We have to have capability and capacity and innovation on our side.

Michael Green: And allies inside The First Island Chain who were with us. And we have that.

David Berteau: Absolutely.

Michael Green: We have to build on it. So who said logistics isn't fun? Thanks Dave.

David Berteau: Thank you. Appreciate Michael. And I'll come back when we've solved this problem and we'll describe it.

Michael Green: Excellent. Thank you. Great having you on.

David Berteau: You're welcome.

Andrew Schwartz: Thanks for listening, for more on strategy and the Asia Programs Work visit the CSIS website at csi.org and click on the Asia Program page.

Bonny Lin: Asia Chessboard listeners. I'm Bonny Lin, Director of the CSIS China Power Project and host of the China Power podcast. I'm inviting you to listen to our conversations with leading experts on the challenges and opportunities presented by China's growing power. We discussed topics such as Chinese military capabilities, China's relations with other countries, and critical issues in US-China relations. You can listen and subscribe to the China Power podcast wherever you get your podcasts or on chinapower.csis.org.