US Defense Logistics by the Numbers: The Cheatsheet

Aerial resupply, the hard way
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DID will cover WBR’s Defense Logistics conference on Dec. 3-5 in Alexandria, VA. The following entry gives a quick sense of the massive scale of US military logistics, for background context. It aims to provide orders of magnitude and key datapoints, rather than extremely precise and detailed data.

The US Department of Defense is well known as one of the largest organizations worldwide, with its sprawling physical footprint across the world and massive needs for storage, transportation, and distribution. How big of a logistics user and provider do they turn out to be? Let’s find out.

Not built in a day

Middle East

• Iran’s Condor Legion, Hezbollah, has been fighting and even running large sections of Assad’s war in Syria for some months now. With the USA on the sidelines and ineffective, the Gulf Arab states are reportedly recruiting a Sunni counterforce in places like Pakistan. That should provide lots of good training for future bad actors – but the logic of the war compels it. The thing is, it takes way more than recruitment to build an effective counterforce, including media outlets, and consistent revenue/operative training via components like criminal enterprises with global reach. Hezbollah wasn’t built in a day.