Wargaming News
The CAMOLAND Wargame Mentioned During a Recent US Congressional Hearing
I was watching the Youtube video only to see how US DoD officials and military leaders udner the new US administration would respond to hard and critical questions from the Congress regarding the new adminstration's defense policy in the Indo-Pacific and did not expect to hear about the wargame, but I was lucky to have happenend to learn about the wargame.
According to CNA, the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) asked the think tank in 2023 to design and execute a wargame to explore the vulnerabilities, bottlenecks, and limitations of the clothing and textile defense industrial base (C&T IB) and its ability to support wartime demand for clothing and textile items during concurrent contingencies.
Some of the key wargame results mentioned during the hearing and the key insights highlighted in the CNA's report provide not just wakeup calls but useful implications for other counties (including Japan) as well:
- "Supply chains have a fundamental “speed limit” to ramping up. Supply chain bottlenecks occur when a company runs out of staff, materials, or equipment, and production cannot increase further until the bottleneck is addressed. Because material bottlenecks depend on companies upstream, the ramp-up time requires every company within the supply chain to ramp up (from upstream to downstream).
- Within the wargame, this resulted in the C&T IB being unable to meet new DLA demand for multiple turns during contingency operations.
- Furthermore, DLA’s stockpiles were unable to fully mitigate the wargame demand. This would have resulted in military personnel lacking uniforms and the corresponding environmental or physical protection.
- In large-scale contingencies, everything becomes a bottleneck, and there is no “cure-all.” ..."
The wargame was about a specific industry, but given the networked nature of the supply chains, a problem in one industry could result in even larger problembs in even a larger number of other industries. Furthermore, not just C&T IB, other IBs would face the same problem.
Finally, I liked ADM Paparo's comment in his response saying, "From a wargaming standpoint, bad news is good news because we can act on it and we run to the problem. ...World War II was won every bit as much on our abiity to supply to sustain the force as any we frequently overlook items that we take for granted. This is why we do wargames and we embrace that data and it's our duty to act on it."
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