PARALLEL EQUATIONS
More than 750,000 major end items, worth more than $36 billion, are cur- rently in Afghanistan, according to DOD estimates. Some two-thirds of those items are in Army hands. Dealing with these items is expected to cost close to $5.7 billion and will require intri- cate planning, teamwork, creativity and innovation.
Army AL&T wanted to know how one of the greatest movers of stuff in the world does it, and Wilke did not disappoint. In an Aug. 7 interview with Army AL&T, he offered insights on planning, model- ing and management of logistics that reflect both his chemical engineering and his business training. As it turns out, sometimes the solution to a problem in one area of expertise is entirely appli- cable to another.
Q. You’re said to be a logistics whiz, and Amazon has an enormous logistics opera- tion spanning the globe. Te military in general, and the Army in particular, have a massive retrograde underway. If suddenly that were your job, how would you approach it, both logistically and organizationally, to make the task more manageable?
A. Tis seems from the outside to be a gargantuan task. As a citizen, I’m so proud and amazed that our military will complete this mission. If presented this challenge, I suspect my approach would go something like this. Step 1: Be hum- bled. Whatever my teams have achieved in the past does not secure our future. Only great planning and execution of this mission matters.
I’d start by ensuring we have the right leaders in place: Do we have great field leaders who know how to make adjust- ments to a good plan in the moments when local judgment counts? Do we
114 Army AL&T Magazine
BOTTLENECKED
Backups are a logistical problem common to both the Army and Amazon. Here, traffic moves slowly through Torkham Gate, which lies on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, on Dec. 20, 2012. (U.S. Army photo by SGT Jon Heinrich, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Public Affairs)
have the best analytical minds, utilizing the most current modeling techniques and machine intelligence to build a robust plan?
Do we have as my direct reports the very best
leaders for each critical function?
Once I’m confident we have the right lead- ers in place, I’d want our senior team to understand the situation as completely as possible. What is the definition of “mission complete”? What dates are immovable? Where do we have flexibility? What bud- get for talent and money is available?
Tere are many ways to build shared understanding of the situation among the senior
team. I’ve found scenario
analysis, including inspecting the inputs and outputs of a detailed model, to be among the most effective. My brain would first model the retrograde as a classic transportation problem, where we have source nodes (places where we have assets to move) and sink nodes (places where we want the assets to be, includ- ing destroyed.) Arcs connecting the nodes have characteristic flow times and
capacities. Built the incomplete way, this model would assume that all values char- acterizing the system were deterministic or without randomness. But such plans are almost always too brittle. One might say, “Let’s build a plan that assumes every day, every moment will operate at the expected value of each of the inputs.” Unfortunately, things don’t operate at the expected value. Tey operate with a dis- tribution of outcomes.
VERY SIMPLY, WE THINK THAT THINKING SMALL IS A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY. SO WE ASK PEOPLE TO ENVISION BOLDER DIRECTIONS BECAUSE THEY’LL LEAD TO BOLD RESULTS, AND IT ALSO INSPIRES THE TEAM TO THINK DIFFERENTLY.
October–December 2013
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