Katherine Welch
After examining more than a hundred wargames and tabletop exercises, the conclusion is unavoidable: The US joint force has a logistics problem. And it does not stem from a lack of effort, insight, or participation. Rather, the real problem is that the board has not moved. Despite repeated play, the joint force’s game pieces—force design choices, posture decisions, assumptions about operational feasibility, and risk decisions—remain largely unchanged, even as wargames have begun to advance the decomposition of contested environments and illuminate the real-world logistics challenges US forces will face under congested and contested conditions.
Across the Department of Defense, industry, interagency partners, and allied and partner nations, logistics is routinely described as decisive, and just as routinely treated as secondary. As the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has observed, contested logistics is among the “key capability areas” that are inherently joint, multidomain, and multitheater. This emphasis reflects a broader continuity in senior military leadership: The previous chairman similarly underscored that “all our operations are underwritten by logistics,” explicitly linking sustainment to deterrence and strategic effect. Wargames repeatedly surface the same vulnerabilities, creating a set of well-established known knowns about logistics in contested conditions. Yet those insights rarely translate into changed assumptions, altered force design, or binding institutional decisions. The result is a cycle of activity without progress because we keep rediscovering logistics vulnerabilities instead of converting them into operational advantage.
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