War Lab — Logistics Under Fire: How the U.S. Army Plans to Survive a Contested War

In this episode of The War Lab, we open the command-planning documents and step deep inside one of the most consequential transformations underway in modern warfare: the total redesign of U.S. Army sustainment for large-scale combat operations. This isn’t a tweak to doctrine or a marginal efficiency gain—it’s a philosophical reset driven by a single hard truth: in a war against a peer adversary, logistics will be hunted, disrupted, deceived, and destroyed.

We break down the rise of contested logistics, where every movement across land, sea, air, space, cyber, and the electromagnetic spectrum is under persistent surveillance and precision threat. The era of safe rear areas, massive stockpiles, and predictable resupply is over. Survival now depends on dispersion, deception, speed, and data.

At the heart of this episode is the Army’s radical organizational shift: the Light Support Battalion (LSB) and its three-node cluster concept, which shatters the traditional brigade support area into mobile, redundant logistics launch centers designed to survive missile strikes, drone swarms, and deep fires. We explain why forward support companies were eliminated, how maintenance and distribution were centralized, and the real risks this places on junior leaders tasked with managing brigade-wide sustainment under fire.

From there, we dive into the technological backbone of the transformation. You’ll learn how predictive sustainment, powered by item-level tracking, unified data architecture, and AI-assisted analytics, is moving logistics from reactive to anticipatory—fixing equipment before it fails and allocating supplies before shortages emerge. We examine how enterprise systems are being rebuilt, why data integrity is now a warfighting requirement, and how sustainment leaders are using commercially available tools to generate a single trusted operational picture.

The episode also explores the physical fight to move supplies when roads, ports, and airfields are contested. We cover autonomous resupply vessels, cargo drones, last-mile aerial delivery systems, and the growing role of additive manufacturing—where soldiers can fabricate critical parts at the point of need instead of waiting on fragile global supply chains. Logistics, in this model, is no longer passive support—it’s a maneuver element.

We then turn to the human dimension: how logistics officers are now trained as sensors, drone operators, and base defenders; how reconstitution models like Iron Forge regenerate combat power in hours instead of weeks; and where dangerous capability gaps remain—from expeditionary port opening in the Pacific to sustainment in the Arctic and amphibious medical evacuation under A2/AD threat.

Finally, we confront the most controversial idea of all: offensive logistics. Sustainment forces using their own signatures, data, and mobility to deceive, fix, and destroy the enemy’s ability to fight—turning logistics into a weapon in the deep battle.

This episode is a deep, unflinching look at how wars are actually won—or lost—before the first maneuver unit ever reaches the objective. If you want to understand the future of conflict, you have to understand how armies will feed, fuel, repair, and regenerate under fire.

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