Simply put, a well-managed supply chain can prevent a suicide bombing—by delivering a bullet to a terrorist’s heart before he blows himself and others up.

Both sense-and-respond logistics and net-centric operations aim for acute awareness of the up-to-the-minute state of distributed operators’ needs, equally precise knowledge of the state of the distributed providers’ ability to satisfy those needs and delivery of the best available products directly to the most critical operators.

“There is no technological difference between acquiring a new system and refreshing an existing one. But the former is more difficult, less efficient and takes longer.”

The idea is to eliminate the middleman to manage what supply chain jargon labels the “inventory at rest” between suppliers and consumers. Inventory at rest costs money and time to maintain. Net-centrically speaking, inventory at rest is pure overhead.

Just as the supply chain management required to achieve desired warfighting effects should be a subset of net-centric operations, the logistics and maintenance required to deliver information processing effects should be a subset of net-centric supply chain management. Certainly, large companies continuously roll out improvements to their network processing capability, trying to achieve on-the-fly, in-close communications with customers and directly target customers’ needs.

From 2000 to 2002, just as DOD was developing the Global Information Grid concept, I did a tour of duty at the Pentagon. I worked on acquisition of a major network. I learned that it takes years to define requirements during the acquisition process, more years to capture dollars and even more years to build systems. During my next assignment I had command of a supercomputer network operations center and was responsible for lifecycle maintenance of a major system.

It was my job to make sure that tech refreshes kept fielded IT relevant. In other words, my task was to get the best effect from my current maintenance budget by teaming with vendors and warfighting customers to roll out critical capabilities on the fly. Over the course of those two assignments, I learned that there is no technological difference between acquiring a new system and refreshing an existing one. But the former is more difficult, less efficient, more time-consuming and less effective than the latter.

Here’s an idea: How about if we simply declare that DOD’s major networks and systems, such as the GIG, are already acquired? That way our warriors and engineers can work together to get down to the business of sense-and-respond GIG lifecycle maintenance and deliver bullets and information to places where they’ll have better effect—faster.

Chris Gunderson is a research associate professor of information science at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is also executive director of the Worldwide Consortium for the Grid (www.w2cog.org) sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

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