Unmanned Surface Vessels Can Support Troops on the Beach
- January 02, 2025
One of the most frequently-read recent articles on this site is Mike Daum’s excellent piece: Infantry Wins Battles, Logistics Wins Wars: The Role of the Army’s ‘Little Navy’ in the Pacific. As the title implies, this piece is focused on the U.S. Army; however, two key statements universalize Daum’s argument. He argues that “getting American troops into the fight is relatively easy—the hard part is keeping them there” and that “one suggestion is to integrate uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) into the logistics chain”—both of these points extend beyond the Army’s needs.
The challenge of providing logistics sustainment to forces in the field is not a new phenomenon. Over 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu noted, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.” One need not be a historian to understand the importance of logistics to warfare over many millennia. From Alexander the Great (who noted: “My logisticians are a humorless lot…they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay”) to Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan (“Logistics are as vital to military success as daily food is to daily work”) to General Robert Barrow, then-Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, who coined a phrase that is still a staple of U.S. War College curricula: “Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.”
