Logistics and US Force Readiness

By Kelly M. Greenhill

Sergeant Lewis Howard looks over cargo paperwork over Afghanistan. US Army photo.

An old military adage, frequently attributed to US Army General Omar Bradley, a highly-decorated, senior WWII field commander, is that “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” With this quip in mind, if you want get a quick and dirty — and possibly quite telling — sense of where the US Army sees itself deploying and what missions it expects to take on in the post-Iraq and -Afghanistan era, a good place to start is with its plan to rethink, relocate and reconfigure some of its extensive stocks of Prepositioned Overseas Materiel, Configured in Unit Sets (commonly known as POMCUS).

Thom Shanker offers up a taste of what the Army has in mind in the July 27th issue of the New York Times.