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Voodoo Logistics Sink Triphibious Warfare

By Commander Terry C. Pierce, U.S. Navy

September 1996 Proceedings Volume 122/9/1,123

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Winston Churchill dubbed U.S. military operations in the Pacific as “triphibious warfare.”1
Voodoo logistics caused tragic losses at Guadalcanal and would have again in the Gulf War had
Iraq not been such a weak adversary and had we not had the luxury of prebuilt shore
infrastructure awaiting fully loaded maritime prepositioning ships.

Triphibious warfare not only characterized the composite nature of warfare being waged by
sea, land, and air forces, it also aptly predicted the trend toward multiservice operations
during the next 50 years. Comparing the six-month Guadalcanal fight—the first U.S. campaign
of World War II to see enormous violence in all three warfare dimensions—to the four-month
Gulf War, we see that our joint task force commanders and their staffs are becoming
increasingly adept at coordinating, integrating, and employing the elements of the joint
combined- arms team. These are encouraging developments; however, until logistics receives
legitimate attention from all participants—and until we have a complementary vision for the
logistics concepts that will support the style of warfare that the Revolution in Military Affairs
envisions—our military and our nation will receive a minimal return on its investment in joint
warfighting. The result could undermine our ability to wage and win the next war.

The Joint Force Commander concept has its roots in the epic Guadalcanal campaign. No other
episode in World War II better illustrates the interdependence of the services and the need to
employ U.S. military power under joint force commanders. The distinguishing feature of
triphibious warfare is its inclusiveness—all elements, including logistics, were inextricably
woven together. Perhaps the most important and painful lesson we learned at Guadalcanal
was the daunting challenge of logistics, the operational art of bringing together the complex
web of services required to support our joint warfighters. Never have so many known so little
about such a pivotal part of warfighting than U.S. forces planning and executing the logistics at
Guadalcanal. In the end, the exorbitant tragic losses we endured were gruesome evidence of
the truth of General Omar Bradley’s assertion that, “Amateurs talk about strategy;
professionals talk about logistics.”2
Logistically, the overall picture of the Gulf War achieving spectacular success is as broad and
familiar as many of the disastrous details are obscure. Iraq proved to be a weak opponent, but
if it had been as tenacious as our Guadalcanal opponent, would our logistics effort have been
sufficient? The answer is almost certainly no. As more accurate information about the Gulf
War slowly surfaces, it appears that logistically we fought this war the same way we fought
Guadalcanal. If there is one concrete theme resonating from Guadalcanal and the Gulf War it is
that the triphibious revolution of jointness has not gone far enough in the area of logistics.

The amphibious assault by U.S. forces at Guadalcanal provides an enduring example of the
lethal consequences of senior officers failing to fathom the tenets of joint logistics. Logistics
support, like warfare in general, does not just happen. If it is to prove successful, it must be
properly planned and conducted, meaning the “plan” is attainable, flexible, and sustainable,
and the joint commander is aware of all constraints. The supply problem at Guadalcanal was
rooted in prewar neglect, poor staff work, and the hasty launching of Operation Watchtower.3

As soon as the war in the Pacific began, U.S. planners quickly dusted off War Plan Orange, an
Army-Navy strategy for fighting Japan. Conceived in 1907, the War Plan Orange and its logistics
annexes went through numerous transformations. As the actual logistic readiness of the Navy
declined during the interwar years, the war plans grew less and less realistic. Thus by fall 1941,
the plan called for a joint force capable of sailing from Hawaii and seizing objectives in the
Marshalls only 60 days after hostilities began. Most certainly, the day prior to Pearl Harbor the
Army could not have mounted such a force, and the Navy could not have transported it.4
Nevertheless, the plan continued to be updated without realistic logistical support.

By the time the Japanese had conquered much of Southeast Asia, Rear Admiral Richmond Kelly
Turner, Director of Naval War Plans, had updated War Plan Orange with a four-stage plan of
attack that included an offensive through the Solomons, an island chain that included
Guadalcanal. To support these strikes. Admiral Turner defined the logistics requirements that
included Main Fleet Advanced Naval Bases called “Lions,” and Secondary Advanced Naval
Bases called “Cubs.”5

Admiral Turner got the chance to execute his brainchild as Guadalcanal’s Amphibious Force
Commander. When Admiral Ernest J. King learned the Japanese were beginning work on an
airfield at Guadalcanal, he hastily ordered Watchtower to start within a month, which left no
time to refine logistics support. Admiral Turner soon discovered that his plan like the German
Schlieffen Plan of World War I, was operationally brilliant but logistically impracticable.6 The
Navy could not provide adequate sealift for all the troops, supplies, and vehicles, and Admiral
Turner’s South Pacific base system was not ready to support Watchtower.7 Although
considerable attention and practice had crafted a doctrine of amphibious assault, little
searching thought and no realistic practice had been afforded in conducting a sizable landing
from crude bases 6,000 miles from the United States.
Admiral Turner did not realice that most of the South Pacific Islands they intended to use as
forward naval bases lacked such rudimentary elements as potable water, habitation. Fresh
food, roads, and docks. Operating under such primitive conditions was a tough challenge, but
the most difficult challenge was dealing with the critical shortage of fuel. Planners, for
example, never foresaw that refueling B-17s at forward bases like Santo, New Herbides, would
involve dumping steel drums of fuel over the sides of the cargo vessels and then towing them
ashore where they were manhandled. Since one single B-17 drank up 50 drums of aviation fuel
each mission, all available hands worked on the bucket lines. To support the initial Guadalcanal
landing. Colonel Saunders and his entire Army air crews worked a bucket line 20 hours straight
through a driving storm to put 2,500 gallons aboard each of the bombers.8 Likewise, no one
predicted the problems that arose at Noumea, New Caledonia-the pivotal forward base
supporting the Guadalcanal operation. Located almost 1,000 miles from Guadalcanal and
6,500 miles from San Francisco, Noumea suffered from not only limited docking facilities but
also limited coordination between the Army and Navy. This resulted, at times, in upwards of 80
partially unloaded vessels waiting idle in the harbor to be off-loaded.9 Such a delay created
longer turnaround times back to San Francisco.

Thus, prewar neglect and poor staff work created a complicated logistical problem for
Guadalcanal that showed a lack of consideration for the principles of survivability and
sustainability. Tactically, the critical problem was air cover. Enough combat power was needed
to get the landing force and their supplies ashore and to provide uninterrupted resupply for
the duration of the operation. To counter Japanese land-based aircraft that were within range
of Guadalcanal, the Americans had three carriers and Army Air Force B-17s flying from Santo.
Fortunately, the amphibious landings achieved both tactical and strategic surprise as the
Japanese were totally caught off guard, but the Japanese were quick to strike back, which cut
short the off load of troops and supplies. With almost 2,000 more Marines left to off-load and
only half their supplies ashore, the Marines encountered their first attack from both the air
and the ground.

From the outset, the absence of both supplies and aircraft threatened the survival of U.S.
forces as much as the prospect of more Japanese forces descending on Guadalcanal. It was
obvious our triphibious team could not hold Guadalcanal if they could not get supplies in, and
they could not get supplies in if the Japanese bombers continued to come down and bomb the
ships unloading supplies.11’ Thus began the six-month struggle for Guadalcanal with one side
trying to ensure the safe arrival of troops and supplies on the island and the other side
determined to frustrate those attempts.” Simply put, the heart of the first few weeks as well as
the ensuing six-month battle was logistics. We had achieved surprise and seized the initiative,
but we were unable to keep the enemy off balance and exploit our success because of
inadequate support.

Recasting the first few weeks of the Gulf War from a Guadalcanal perspective, one gets a weird
sense of deja vu. Those first U.S. trigger-pullers arriving shortly after Iraq’s excursion to Kuwait
must have had a sick sensation that something they were experiencing had happened before.
One of the most memorable low points of the Gulf War was when U.S. troops—like those first
Guadalcanal Marines—were left to defend themselves without adequate supplies. As with
Guadalcanal, the supply problems of the Gulf War lay rooted in prewar neglect, poor staff
work, and the hasty launching of Operation Desert Shield.

As soon as Iraq overran Kuwait, Central Command planners, responsible for the defense of the
Saudi Arabian Peninsula, quickly dusted off OPLAN 1002-90, which was based on a global
threat of a Soviet attack through Iran. During summer 1990, President George Bush announced
a new defense strategy that shifted the threat from global to regional.12 As a result, CentCom
was in the process of revising the plan when Iraq launched its attack. Although CentCom had
war-gamed their draft plan, the final logistical support plan and time-phased force and
deployment data (a computer-based master list for sequencing joint cargo and personnel) did
not exist. Simply put, OPLAN 1002-90 was not complete, and specific deployment data was
lacking.13 In fact. General Norman Schwarzkopf’s logistic planner, Lieutenant General William
Pagonis, wrote the original logistic plan for the Gulf War while flying to Saudi Arabia.14

General Schwarzkopf, like Admiral Turner, got the chance to execute his plans. Fortunately, the
U.S. Peace Hawk program during the 1980s provided Saudi Arabia with $5 billion to build
several air bases, including Dhahran, the largest air strip in the world. In addition, the United
States assisted in building two immense roll-on/roll-off ports. Unfortunately, however, General
Schwarzkopf was relying on 19 days of pre-hostility deployments and nine more days of
deployments after hostilities began before lead enemy elements reached defensive positions
near Al-Jubayl. Obviously, these plans were overly optimistic. Once General Schwarzkopf could
dispatch military forces, he immediately inserted the 82nd Airborne without any logistic
support structure. The gravity of the situation is illustrated by the elite paratroopers soon
relying on Marines for rations.15 Subsequently, he decided to “step up and expand the
deployment of combat forces, especially antiarmor assets such as A-10 units, at the expense of
badly needed spare parts and ammunition.”16 By accelerating the deployment of combat
forces and deferring deployment of theater logistic forces. General Schwarzkopf tried to
impress the Iraqis with a conspicuous display of firepower, but the troops were vulnerable,
because without needed supplies they could not maneuver and fight. Likewise, the first Air
Force fighter squadrons to arrive also were immediately vulnerable because of inadequate
support. For example, 48 F-15 Eagles flew nonstop to Dhahran, accomplishing a new record for
the longest overseas deployment ever made by U.S. fighters, but once they got there, the
fighters sat on the Dhahran runway with scarcely enough fuel to fly. Over the next several days
as more fighters arrived, they too sat on the Dhahran runway with scarcely enough fuel,
except for the short publicity sorties made for the benefit of television news crews.17 It took
several more days before their ground crews and maintenance equipment arrived and the fuel
shortage was solved.

As Title V—the final report to Congress on the conduct of the Persian Gulf War—summarizes,
“Although U.S. forces arrived quickly, there was a lengthy period of vulnerability during which
Coalition forces could not have repulsed an Iraqi invasion.”18 Put another way, inserting forces
into theater without adequate logistics substantially raises the risk of defeat.
Half a century has elapsed since we first deployed “triphibious” forces into a theater to blunt
the advances of an aggressor. Building upon that triphibious experience at Guadalcanal, we
have moved continually toward joint solutions; in 1986, jointness became codified with the
passage of Goldwater-Nichols. The aim of that statute is to move beyond “mutual
cooperation” without diminishing the unique spirit and skills of each service. Goldwater-
Nichols is no panacea, but with jointness as the military’s mantra, it seemed to usher in a
“bright new era” of team playing that culminated in the unparalleled success in the Gulf
War.19

It is hard to dislike the logistics success of the Gulf War—even when carefully extricating and
examining the hurdles that plagued Coalition forces during the initial moments of occupying
Saudi Arabia. Logistics got rave reviews. No hyperbole seemed too great; terms such as
“logistics miracle” were evoked to characterized our victory.20 John Chancellor of NBC News
said, “This was a logistician’s war. Logistics, the movement of troops and supplies, made all the
difference.”21 Conventional wisdom has it that our logistics effort during Operation Desert
Storm was next to spectacular. Lost in the praise of our logistics accomplishments is the fact
that logistics support during the Gulf War—especially during the first two weeks—was in
disarray. In fact, logistic support looked almost like Guadalcanal support on a bad day. Using
our World War II approach that substituted brute force and deployment of massive quantities
of material for a well- managed logistics support effort, our computers successfully sent twice
as much material to the Persian Gulf as we needed.22 The numbers were staggering: the
mobilization of 55,000 troops, the shipment of 7,000,000 tons of supplies, and the pumping of
1.3 billion gallons of fuel.23 In addition, half of the 40,000 bulk containers shipped into the
theater had to be opened to identify their contents.

Guadalcanal—not the Gulf War—is a better model of what we likely will face in the future.
Unlike during the Gulf War, we probably will not have a prebuilt shore infrastructure—
airfields, roads, terminals, ports—already in place and several months to get our forces and
logistics ready. In addition, we cannot count on every future opponent to simply give up
without a fight. More likely, as in Guadalcanal, we will encounter a compelling enemy who is
bent on crushing us immediately as we attempt to plant our forces ashore.

Viewing Gulf War logistics through the experience of the Guadalcanal campaign, we see a
potentially disastrous division between combat arms and those in a supporting role. Clearly,
we do not believe that warfighters are from Mars and logisticians are from Venus, but when
we focus our logistic telescope on these two campaigns, there is enough of a supplier-to-
shooter gap to make anyone wonder whether warfighters and logisticians inhabit the same
planet. The widest point in this gap occurred in our lackluster planning to support the
Guadalcanal operations, but gap-watchers did have a vivid moment during the first two weeks
of the Gulf War as the age-old tension between the interest of warfighters and logisticians
arose. The issue is not the importance of logistics but the unconscious assumptions of a
warfighting culture that believes that the unglamorous and under appreciated activities of
logistics should be left to a beleaguered species we call logisticians. Comfortable with placing
logistics on the back burner, warfighters are focusing on glamorous innovations such as exotic
weaponry and the promising marvels of high- tech gadgetry. This approach has unknowingly
placed jointness in a funk; it is lost in the funhouse of technological change, not heeding
Martin Van Creveld’s enduring warning that “logistics make up as much as nine tenths of the
business of War.”24 Put simply, logistics defines operations at the operational level. A
campaign plan that cannot be logistically supported is not a plan at all but simply an expression
of fanciful wishes.25

Creating an illusion of support for the trigger pullers is “voodoo logistics.” If we are to improve
in triphibious warfare, warfighters must replace their belief in the foolery of voodoo logistics
and understand that there is an art to logistics for which they—not the logisticians—bear
primary responsibility. Embracing such a responsibility implies a commitment to ensure that
logistic innovation keeps pace with warfighting innovations.

The next-generation of warfighting tools may be more glamorous to talk about, but the battle
plans of the next century also must focus on logistic innovations required to support our
triphibians. As long as warfighters turn a blind eye to the art of logistics, poor logistics support
will continue. By sugarcoating the early logistics chaos of the Gulf War, warfighters are
convincing themselves that future success hinges on the marvels of technology. But the result
may be another Guadalcanal predicament where scarce logistics constrain our ability to fight.
And sure enough, an embattled triggerpuller, lacking adequate logistics and shrinking in
churlish resentment, will get that deja vu abandoned feeling as he waits for the magical
support of voodoo logistics.

1 Richard B. Frank, Guadalcanal (Penguin Books, 1992), p. 600.

2John Pimlott and Stephen Badsey, “The Gulf War Assessed,” Arms and Armour, 1992, p. 81.

3 Frank, p. 134.

4 Duncan Ballantine, U.S. Naval Logistics in the Second World War, Princeton, 1947, p. 34.

5 VAdm. George Dyer, USN, The Amphibious Came to Conquer, U.S. Government Printing
Office, Vol. 1, p. 253.

6 Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1977), PP. 2-3.

7 Allan R. Millet, Semper Fidelis (Free Press, 1991), p. 365.

9 Richard Leighton and Robert Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, (U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1995), p. 399.

10 Dyer, pp. 413-415

11 Frank Uhlig, “How Navies Fight, and Why,” The Naval War College Review, Winter 1995, p.
43.

12 Title V, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War (U.S. Government Printing Office, April 1992), p.
349.

13 Ibid, p. 352.

14 Lt.Gen. William Pagonis, USA, “Good Logistics is Combat Power,” Military Review,
September 1991, p. 29.

15 Lt.Col. David Evans, USMC (Ret.), “From the Gulf,” Proceedings, January 1991, p. 77

16 Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, The General’s War (Little Brown, 1995), p. 63.

17 Duncan Anderson, “The Build Up,” The Gulf War Assessed (Arms and Armor Press, 1992), p.
85.

18 Title V, p. 390.

19 John Quigley, “Creating Joint Warfighters,” Proceedings, September 1995, p. 62.

20 Lt.Gen. Gary Mear, USAF, and Lieutenant Ted Kim, USA, “Logistics: The Way Ahead,” JFQ, p.
39.
21 Paul Kaminski, “The Revolution in Defense Logistics, Defense Issues, Vol 10, Number 107, p.
1.

22 Ibid, p. 5.

23 Title V, p. 394; Lt.Gen. William G. Pagonis, Moving Mountains (Harvard Business School
Press, 1992), introduction.

24 Martin Van Creveld, p. 231.

25 U.S. Marine Corps, Warfighting Course 8501, Vol. 1, 2B-B-10.

Commander Pierce recently was a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations. He is the
prospective commanding officer of the USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41).

Digital Proceedings content made possible by a gift from CAPT Roger Ekman, USN (Ret.)

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