SUSTAINMENT OF THE STAND-IN FORCE
JOHN SATTELY AND JASON A. PAREDESSEPTEMBER 12, 2022
After a congressional visit to Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China rapidly and without warning begins to ramp up military activity. Beijing launches missiles into the South China Sea and deploys ships around the island. In response, Washington reaches out to key partners in the region such as Japan and Australia to negotiate storage, sustainment, and port and airfield access agreements. The Department of Defense also begins stand-in force operations, augmented with smaller collaborative forces, to begin conducting reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance activities. The U.S. Marine Corps rapidly deploys several stand-in forces across the Indo-Pacific Command to support sea-denial operations. As this situation begins to escalate, logistics planners quickly try to coordinate the long-term sustainment for an unknown and potentially extended period. Soon, logisticians are struggling to sustain these forces afloat and ashore in a complex and contested environment.
This is the kind of scenario that Gen. David Berger, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, likely had in mind last December when he released his Concept for Stand-In Forces. This concept describes how the Marine Corps intends to operate in contested areas, like the South China Sea, where the threat of long-range precision fires is augmented by increasingly ubiquitous sensor networks. The concept was designed to provide the joint force commander with options for sustaining forward positioning in these hostile environments. General Berger expanded the concept to say that these forces will provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, support targeting, and conduct sea denial within naval campaigns. As the “Task Force at the Bleeding Edge” recently demonstrated, stand-in forces are designed to be employed as a naval expeditionary force in the littorals. In order to sustain this force, the commandant envisions an approach built around “avoidance.” This calls for a minimization of logistics personnel and traditional logistical capabilities, such as large, wheeled trucks, fuel supplies, and chow halls. The goal is to reduce the force’s visible and electronic signature and thereby increase its survivability. As such, the avoidance concept creates major challenges for the Marine Corps. It also complicates the joint force’s traditional understanding of logistics sustainment, which involved logistics units operating behind, yet still relatively close to, front-line fighting units. Without logistics units in close proximity, it remains unclear how stand-in forces would be sustained in competition and especially in conflict.
https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/sustainment-of-the-stand-in-force/?singlepage=1
