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The U.S. Navy, along with the rest of the U.S. armed forces, places significant emphasis on preparing for a potential war with China in the western Pacific. If deterrence fails, supporting any necessary military operations will be the greatest logistical challenge the United States has faced in decades. The Navy is beginning to reckon with those challenges, but a lack of explicit frameworks for understanding the response options hampers alignment of effort and effective investment.1 This article outlines some of the challenges of conducting contested logistics and defines a framework composed of three distinct approaches to overcoming these challenges: More Is More, Efficient to Be Effective, and Forecast and Push. It analyzes each approach and, without dismissing the first two, recommends emphasizing Forecast and Push.
THE LOGISTICAL CHALLENGE OF MODERN WARFARE
As the ongoing war in Ukraine reminds us, intense conflict uses resources intensively. The conflicts artillery ammunition consumption is illustrative. In the spring of 2023, Ukraine fired 110,000 rounds of 155 mm ammunition per month and claimed it could have used five times that many.2 Though plans are in place to increase production, as of March 2023, the United States was only producing 14,000 155 mm artillery shells per month-less than 15 percent of Ukraine's monthly consumption at the time.3 Consumption-production mismatches also exist for Javelin antitank missiles, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles, and Stinger and Patriot antiair missiles.4
While Ukraine demonstrates the logistical intensity of modern warfare, a potential conflict with China is a better metric for the logistical demands the Navy and joint force need to be able to meet. The 2022 National Defense Strategy declared the effort of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) to "refashion the Indo-Pacific region" to be the "most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. National Security."5 While the United States is not formally committed to the defense of Taiwan, the Department of Defense has called such a situation the "pacing scenario."6
Any armed conflict between the United States and China easily could produce the most intense combat seen in decades. Recent unclassified war games suggested that should the United States and its allies find themselves defending Taiwan, the first two weeks of combat could involve hundreds of ships and aircraft. In these war games,...