U.S. military gets "smart" on warehouses
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
The Defense Department's multimillion-dollar bets on smart depots are bearing fruit — but still resemble what you would have found at an Amazon shipping center of yore.
Why it matters: Getting the right supplies to the right people at the right time can mean the difference between blowing something up and getting blown up.
Driving the news: The U.S. Marine Corps is looking to expand its footprint of smart hubs following success in Albany, Georgia, where 5G networking served as a backbone.
- Another smart warehouse, in California, was designed to improve ship-to-shore logistics. It boasted zippy data-transfer speeds and virtual- and augmented-reality experiments.
- Tech has cut processing times at some facilities from hours to minutes. Audits no longer take months. And inventories are more accurately being tracked.
Yes, but: There's a serious lag between what e-commerce giants of the world are doing storagewise and what the Defense Department is doing. It's 2024 and manual logbooks are still in vogue.
What they're saying: "We can be really slow to change when we have an ingrained process," Thomas Rondeau, the Pentagon's principal director for future-generation wireless technologies, told me. "It's a complete change of mentality for a lot of people."
- "What we've proven is that this will make a massive difference in our readiness and our ability to prosecute logistics at scale," he added. "I want to get boxes out of Marines' hands and put rifles back in their hands — that kind of thing."
Logistics is incredibly complicated, especially for a force that fights anywhere in the world at a moment's notice.
- Restocking an outpost or squirreling away artillery shells is radically different than dropping off an armful of packages in suburbia.
- "We put missiles on targets," Rondeau said. "Where's the next missile coming from?"
The latest: The Army last year formed the Contested Logistics Cross-Functional Team.
- Its charge? Figuring out how to schlep stuff from A to B while getting shot at, jammed or otherwise harassed.
- Its creation underlined just how pressing the topic is in this moment. A war with Russia or China would see supply lines paralyzed, factories mangled.
- Autonomous craft and predictive maintenance software could greatly lessen the load on planners and transporters alike.
Be smart: Russia's race to Kyiv, Ukraine, was kneecapped by shoddy planning and resupply.
