Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus issued another directive Dec. 17 in a series of efforts designed to achieve his Innovation Vision for the DON to develop game-changing warfighting concepts and speed new capabilities to the fleet.
Secretary Mabus wrote:
Current Logistics methods require fixed and costly supply chains, extensive maintenance concepts, vulnerable logistics information systems, long training pipelines, and cumbersome business processes designed to maintain specified levels of warfighting performance. The Department of the Navy (DON) must rethink its approach to logistics in order to give the warfighting commander flexible options. The DON could benefit from incorporating advanced technologies such as advanced manufacturing, autonomous systems, and creative use of Adaptive Force Packages on existing and new platforms to transform our logistics concepts to a more agile, scalable warfighting tool.
The Navy and Marine Corps shall:
• Create a task force to explore emerging technologies and innovative concepts that increase or improve our force maneuverability, sustainability, lethality and survivability on the future battlefield.
• Identify opportunities to incorporate new modular, reconfigurable, and disruptive options into evolutionary and operational logistics concepts.
• Conduct war games and experimentation to test and assess these new concepts and stimulate these innovative ideas.
• Based on task force efforts, wargaming, and experimentation, ensure the Navy's developing Distributed Agile Logistics (DiAL) concept is complementary and mutually supportive with the Marine Corps' Expeditionary Force-21 (EF-21) and supporting Expeditionary Logistics (EXLOG) concepts. Together, DiAL and EXLOG will provide warfighter resiliency and reliability in our logistics concepts.
The Services will provide an integrated and detailed plan that reflects complementary and mutually supporting DiAL and EXLOG concepts to the Under Secretary of the Navy within 180 days of this memo.
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