Contested Logistics: Restructuring Battalion Logistics to Combat Peer Threats

by First Lieutenant Brendan Sanders

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When fighting against a peer adversary with advanced ISR, traditional Marine Corps logistics TTPs leave a consistently vulnerable footprint. During a recent Mountain Warfare Training Exercise (MTX), V25 learned this lesson during a ‘practice run’ fighting a peer adversary: a force on force exercise against the Royal Marine Commandos. Throughout the duration of the six-day exercise, the United Kingdom Royal Marines (UKRM) were able to detect and target the battalion’s logistics nodes on three separate occasions. In contrast, the Commandos’ logistics and command and control (C2) elements were untouched throughout the exercise. How did this happen? It’s a simple answer: Marine Corps logistics TTPs have yet to adapt to today’s contested environment.

Nightlight Turns to Daylight

Infantry Marines are trained in the mantra that ‘we own the night.’ This means that Marines move at night in order to mitigate an enemy’s ability to detect friendly forces, as well as leverage the night-vision equipment at our disposal. But with the proliferation of IR and thermal optics, what was once a decisive advantage is now fiction. Recognizing this new reality, V25’s staff identified that moving at night in Bridgeport presented the greatest threat to the unit, specifically from adversary IR-capable drones. This prompted the bottom line to the Battalion Commander, we are inherently more vulnerable operating at night than we are during the day. Quickly, the logistics staff had to solve how to mask heavy equipment in compartmentalized terrain constantly at risk of IR detection.

IR capabilities are not a new threat, but their now ubiquitous presence is a novel challenge. In this case, the cold weather served as the critical and amplifying factor. Bridgeport, California, the host of all MTX evolutions, is notorious for its harsh training environment, especially during winter months. The adversary force recognized this and was prepared to exploit. During the night, the temperatures dropped exponentially, allowing an IR-capable drone to easily spot the sharp contrast between heat signatures with extreme precision, such as the engine blocks of tactical vehicles and generators and the Sierra Nevada mountainside. Marines moving from patrol base to patrol base at night, with their body temperatures rising as they exerted themselves, provided another high contrast target for enemy thermal optics, even at 1,500 feet above ground level (AGL).

How can the Marine Corps Infantry restructure its tactics and the employment of its systems to degrade an enemy's ability to detect us through our combined physical, thermal, and electromagnetic signatures? The conventional infantry answer of practicing ‘pull logistics’ from a node that requires heavy assets producing a prominent and detectable signature (both heat and electromagnetic) is now a risky option when contested by a peer adversary who possesses modern tactical drone platforms and sensors. Logistics needs to be lighter, more agile, and must produce far less heat in order to mitigate an enemy’s ability to exploit what will frequently be assessed as our critical vulnerability to the adversary. What this does not look like is resupply missions every 48 hours from a logistics node in a battalion’s rear area consisting of HMMWVs covered in camouflage netting run by a generator to charge radio batteries. With enemy drones becoming far more prevalent and far more developed (i.e., the ability to pull grids, signal collections capabilities, etc.), this current practice will undoubtedly result in logistics nodes being swiftly targeted. The resulting destruction of already limited logistics capabilities will be crippling to the unit’s ability to accomplish its mission.

The Tactical Context

To contextualize this specific evolution at Bridgeport, the Royal Marines’ mission was to disrupt enemy movement towards an airfield in the southern portion of the U.S. Marines’ area of operation. The task of DISRUPT is inherently oriented towards an enemy and malleable to both defensive and offensive operations. In this case, the Commandos successfully disrupted our offensive scheme of maneuver while sustaining their operation entirely through cache sites that were never revealed. This plan also facilitated their ability to transition rapidly into exploitation by smaller echelons at targets of opportunity, gaining a battlefield advantage through an ambush mentality and surprise.

The UKRM battalion ‘bid for success’ rested at the team-level. Throughout the duration of this exercise, the Royal Marines operated in six to eight-man teams, disaggregated across the battlespace in depth along the two most likely axes of advance. In doing so, the Commandos lacked the ability to integrate battlespace effects and oftentimes employed complementary, rather than mutually supporting forces. Whereas the US Marines retained the ability to place the Commandos into a combined arms dilemma with massed forces and effects.

However, they gained the ability to largely avoid detection from Marine Corps ISR capabilities, maneuver and transition into exploitation more rapidly, and access terrain that provided observation which exposed platoon and company-level movement corridors as well as rear area echelons. This targeting of exposed assets and units in the Marines’ rear area highlighted the Commandos’ ability to gain its third and most detrimental battlefield advantage: asymmetry.

This effect was achieved as the commandos identified large troop echelons, generally at the company-level. They leveraged their packed sustainment and robust placement of resupply caches across terrain assessed not to be accessible by V25. In doing so, the UKRM frequently allowed “surfaces,” such as company formations, to bypass their concealed positions in order to acquire higher payoff targets, “gaps,” such as C2 nodes and logistics elements. This was made possible by their ability to prolong occupation of ambush positions within accessible proximity to pre-planned resupply caches pushed deeper into their battlespace than initially assessed by their American counterparts.

In execution, this severed mobility corridors between V25’s close and rear areas, compromising our battlespace framework. This UKRM tactic took our battalion staff by surprise and allowed the Commandos to move across the Bridgeport training area with greater versatility and more dynamic logistical support than their adversary. Conversely, the U.S. Marines found themselves tethered to the lines of their logistics network and vulnerable to ground and aerial reconnaissance that was continuously soaking the limited axes of approach a legacy battalion can realistically utilize.

When it absolutely, positively must be there overnight

Operational sustainability is intimately linked to survivability on an austere battlefield. So how can the Marine Corps Infantry reduce its logistics signature? I would argue that a good place to start is the TTPs utilized by the Commandos throughout the exercise. The Royal Marines at MTX removed traditional logistic node practices and disaggregated resupply missions across their operating environment. They emplaced caches throughout their battlespace and operated with upwards of ten days of supplies for certain elements of their battalion, ultimately practicing ‘push logistics.’ Rather than constantly recharging and battling the cold’s toll on radio battery life with generators and vehicles, the caches proved vastly more effective.

The caches consisted of crates similar to commercial ‘Yeti’ coolers which maintained a warm enough temperature to preserve radio battery life while offering no detectable signature to an adversary force unless they were quite literally stepped on. These caches were placed across the UKRM area of operations for specific units, with primary and alternate resupply caches for each phase and branch plan of their mission. The caches were positioned forward and rear of their forward line of troops (facilitating dynamic re-tasking and successful exploitation) in areas left uncontested by our battalion and in severely restricted terrain.

Funneling these caches into position occurred via two means: man-packable and motorized movements. Their man-packable method relied heavily on their mountain-trained 6-8 man teams who carried upwards of 110 lbs to a pre-established position before stashing the cache and moving to a hide site that allowed quick access to multiple caches at any given time. Motorized cache emplacement utilized the Commando MRZRs (frequently a two-seat variant that minimized its physical signature and increased the commando’s access to restricted terrain), oftentimes setting the cache sites ahead of their forward line of troops. This cache emplacement tactic was successful through principles similar to those utilized in the execution of a ground reconnaissance mission: avoid compromise, sacrifice security for speed in order to rapidly position caches, and deliberately exfiltrate to avoid enemy contact.

Cache emplacement was a critical event of the UKRM shaping phase and served as conditions set to insert and maneuver teams throughout their area of operations. While generally seeking to disrupt in a more defensive manner, the Commandos found themselves frequently applying the same TTPs to facilitate more offensive exploitation of successful targeting and ambushes of Marine Corps maneuver elements.

Failing to understand that the Commando’s resupply caches were static and concealed, the Marines found themselves searching for a mobile logistics element that simply did not exist, undermining the battalion’s targeting calculus. This assumption denied us the ability to target one of the enemy’s assessed critical requirements throughout the duration of the evolution.

It is important to note that the UKRM’s plan was likely unsustainable for more than 10 days without either resupplying cache sites or establishing new resupply positions. This would have created an opportunity for V25 to exploit if the exercise had continued. While the Commando’s plan offers valuable lessons, they face the same constraints as we do during extended operations.

Key Takeaways

To mitigate the signature of our logistics web, infantry battalions need to make a much more concerted effort to apply the following concepts as we prepare for the next battle:

Strict adherence to comm windows. While information feeds command and control, commanders must stringently employ communication windows in order to reduce battery use. Additionally, an added perk is the reduction of our electromagnetic signature.

Embrace new technology and modernize tactics accordingly. Often, infantry battalions will default to GWOT-era lessons learned. This fails to take into account both emerging technology and modernized adversary tactics. Units should experiment with both unmanned aerial and ground vehicles that can reduce both signature and exposure of our Marines. The use of fiber optically controlled platforms also offers potential masking across the EM spectrum .

Think lighter. While Marine Corps Systems Command works to develop and procure lighter alternatives to HMMWVs and JLTVs (such as the ULTV), modern conflict will force staff planners to ask: What is less likely to be detected and can I get it there? The reality of a future conflict in the littorals is that a battalion’s ability to lift its assets without being targeted and emplace them on an island in the South China Sea is severely limited. The harsh truth: less security, more vulnerable, but harder to detect will often be the answer. Infantry battalion employment of the ULTV (similar to how the commandos utilized their MRZRs) is a big step in the right direction.

When the situation allows for it, source internally. This point is not unfamiliar to Marines. The ability to procure one’s own water and forage for sustainment prolongs a unit’s ability to operate without slowing its tempo down through dependence on resupply. But be wary - that same water feature supporting your hydration or navigation, may be doing the same for the adversary. Never forget that Nature is neutral.

Be properly conditioned. In-shape Marines can carry more on their backs and sustain themselves for longer periods of time. This might seem old-fashioned, but the Commandos put their physical discipline to good use.

The Future Global-Conflict Supply Chain

There is a positive takeaway here: the Marine Corps has the opportunity to adapt as it takes a glimpse into what a future conflict against a peer adversary could look like. This identified critical vulnerability will undoubtedly be exploited by a peer adversary in the future if the Marine Corps refuses to break free of its traditional logistics answer: pulling from heavy assets in a unit’s rear area until multi-domain lines of communication can be secured. Conflicts such as the Russia-Ukraine War reinforce this notion and demonstrate the importance of constantly finding new ways to avoid glaring signatures while maintaining the necessary sustainment to the FLOT. Any severance of the link between a logistics train and its supported unit will prove detrimental to mission success, prompting our adversaries to exploit success and attempt to finish.

These are only a few of the developed solutions both our adversaries and global partners have begun to employ in an attempt to solve the same issues facing our current logistics architecture. Ultimately, the mission of logistics in support of a ground operation requires a mind-set shift from the last twenty years to a much more transparent and multi-domain battlefield.

1stLt Brendan Sanders is the Assistant Intelligence Officer for 2d Battalion, 5th Marines. He can be reached at brendan.l.sanders1@usmc.mil.

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The opinions expressed above are those of the author and The Connecting File. They do not reflect the views of the Department of Defense, the United States Marine Corps, or any other government entity.