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LONDON: Defence Logistics, long understood to underpin the fighting capabilities of Europe's armed forces, is too prone to failure. This is just one of the conclusions of the latest report by industry expert Transport Intelligence, contained in European Defence Logistics 2007.
From ensuring the timely delivery of critical supplies to the front line, or maintaining the performance of hugely complex electronic weaponry, logistics is playing an increasingly important role in the remotest of theatres. Service failure, in the case of defence logistics, results not just in undelivered consignments, but the death of soldiers.
However the occurrence of large pieces of equipment lying in hangars and sheds, unused for the want of maintenance, is an increasing problem for armed forces – and one that can have crippling effects on their operations. This has been powerfully demonstrated by the chronic difficulties that the British have in putting a helicopter fleet in the field in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
So difficult has the task of maintenance become that the major defence ministries are increasingly outsourcing the problem to the weapons manufacturers themselves. Programmes such as Eurofighter now include maintenance logistics as an integral obligation on the weapons manufacturers.
Increasingly it is they who are responsible for keeping these machines in the field, not the armed forces. This is a big change, but according to Thomas Cullen, the report's author, one that has hardly been noticed, let alone understood, by the outside world.
Cullen goes on to claim that the out-sourcing trend is likely to characterise European defence strategy for the foreseeable future bringing benefits to a range of commercial companies including technologically sophisticated logistics providers. However this concept is still very much in its nascent stage and as yet untested. As such, Cullen warns, it is still a 'massive experiment.' Getting it wrong will severely compromise the capabilities of European armed forces.
Transport Intelligence's European Defence Logistics 2007 report explores the evolving logistics structures of major European ministries of defence and the logistics activities of the major weapons manufacturers. It explains the thinking behind the outsourcing developments that characterise logistics activity and provides market sizing and forecasts. It also provides a critique of the British Armed forces' logistics strategy in the Iraq War.
