62 ÆTHER: A JOURNAL OF STRATEGIC AIRPOWER & SPACEPOWER
SYSTEMATIZING
SUPPLY CHAIN
WARFARE
Airpower thinkers must reconsider attacks on the logistics support of modern military
forces using a systems perspective centered on the operations and dynamics of an adversary’s
supply chain. Such a reassessment has become increasingly important, given the return of
major war, the realization a protracted great power war may be possible, the Ukrainian war
experience in terms of economic warfare and interdiction, the rise of heterogenous air-
power, and the potential of aordable mass airpower. is analysis focuses on the target
system—the contemporary supply chain—understood as a restricted complexity system
type characterized by semi- openness, multiple causality, and dispersion. Incorporating key
twentieth-century airpower theories including interdiction, industrial web, and economic
warfare into a twenty-rst-century systems theory approach can advance thinking about the
contemporary application of airpower at the operational, strategic, and grand strategic
levels.
T
here is an apocryphal saying that amateurs talk about strategy but professionals
talk about logistics, the art of moving armies and keeping them supplied.
1
Unsurprisingly, when airpower rst allowed military force to be easily applied
beyond an enemy’s front line, aircra attacked an army’s logistics. Since World War I
though, the concept of logistics has changed.
For most of the twentieth century, businesses sought to keep their activities in- house;
through vertical integration they could rmly control all aspects of their industrial
processes. In the 1990s, however, many companies began shiing to horizontal inte-
gration, using extensive outsourcing and keeping only core functions in- house. e
new concept of supply chains arose while logistics as an idea retreated to being a subset,
mainly about activity administration within a company.
2
Today, modern supply chains
are vast, complex, and global, and can be best understood using a systems perspective.
Such supply chains are systems with a purpose that have a certain operating logic,
which in itself creates sensitivities and vulnerabilities.
1. Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 1.
2. Ronald H. Ballou, “e Evolution and Future of Logistics and Supply Chain Management,” European
Business Review 19, no. 4 (July 2007): 341, https://doi.org/.
Dr. Peter Layton is a visiting fellow at the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
War in an Era of Global Dependence
Peter Layton
