The practice is ancient. The science is young. That gap is the problem.
Armies have moved food, fuel, and weapons through contested ground for thousands of years. Supply chain management as a field of research is a few decades old, and almost all of it grew from studying commercial supply chains in peacetime. The two bodies of knowledge have grown on separate tracks. Contested logistics is where they come together.
Is contested logistics actually new?
No. Contested logistics is the normal state of logistics in large-scale war between great powers, as Amos Fox argues in a 2024 AUSA primer.
The word “logistics” itself comes from the military. Jomini, in his 1838 Summary of the Art of War, called it “the practical art of moving armies.” Alexander the Great built advance depots, timed marches to harvests, and sustained tens of thousands of troops across Asia. As Gen. Ed Daly wrote in Army Sustainment, logistics has always been central to how wars are won.
What we now call supply chain management grew from those military roots. In 2001, my doctoral advisor John T. Mentzer and his co-authors defined it as “the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions … within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain.” That paper has been cited over 5,000 times. The practice is ancient, yet a 2025 review in the Transportation Journal and an earlier look at defense acquisition research both confirm that military and commercial supply chain research have grown on separate tracks.
So how should we define contested logistics?
Here is the working definition my team and I have arrived at after eighteen months of talking with military leaders across the services, including USTRANSCOM, the Joint Staff J4, and the Defense Innovation Unit, among others. It draws on those conversations, on decades of scholarly supply chain research, on doctrine and law, and on the work of officers and researchers who have shaped this field including King, Fox, and Hughes.
Contested logistics is the systemic, strategic, end-to-end coordination of military functions within and across organizations under conditions where an adversary is expected to disrupt operations in every domain.
Four words inside that sentence do most of the work: systemic, strategic, end-to-end, and coordination.
What do those four words mean in practice?
Systemic means no single function fixes this alone. Forecasting, sourcing, movement, maintenance, and sustainment are linked. A break at one node cascades across the network. The response must be coordinated across functions and organizations, not managed in silos.
Strategic means the coordination is deliberate and long-horizon. It is the positioning of supply networks and the design of alternatives before the fight begins. Strategic coordination shapes the conditions for sustainment before contact.
End-to-end means the chain extends from raw materials in the ground to the warfighter at the point of contact. A single focus on the last tactical mile misses the upstream dependencies that determine whether that last mile is possible at all. Contested logistics must span the whole chain, not just the final leg.
Coordination means getting separate players to act as one. It runs in two modes. Integration is structural, where one organization absorbs another through acquisition, merger, or ownership. Collaboration is relational, where separate organizations stay separate but operate as one through shared planning, shared information, and joint processes. Contested logistics needs both, because no single service, agency, or contractor owns the whole chain from raw materials to the warfighter.
How does that map to commercial supply chains?
Two dimensions sit inside that coordination. The “within” is getting groups inside one organization to work together. The “across” is linking suppliers, makers, movers, and users across the whole chain. USTRANSCOM, DLA, and the Joint Staff J4 do both every day. In our field, “logistics” means the flow, the move-and-store work. Supply chain management includes that, plus forecasting, sourcing, production, service, and the coordination of all of it.
In plain terms, it is forecasting what the warfighter will need, planning how to get it there, sourcing the materials, producing the goods, and delivering the fuel, ammo, food, parts, and medical support to the fight, while the enemy tries to break every link in that end-to-end chain.
The practice is ancient. The science is young. Contested logistics is where they meet, and the definition above is a starting line, not a finish.
Sources
Amos C. Fox. “Contested Logistics: A Primer.” Association of the United States Army. 2024. ausa.org
Gen. Ed Daly. “Crisis and Conflict: Sustaining the Joint Force Through Competition.” Army Sustainment. May 2021. alu.army.mil
John T. Mentzer et al. “Defining Supply Chain Management.” Journal of Business Logistics 22, no. 2 (2001): 1-25. doi.org
David Loska et al. “Military Supply Chain Logistics and Dynamic Capabilities.” Transportation Journal 64 (2025): e70002. wiley.com
Karey L. Shaffer and Keith F. Snider. “Seven Years of U.S. Defense Acquisition Research.” Journal of Public Procurement 14, no. 4 (2014): 451-472. semanticscholar.org
Maj. Jon Michael King. “Contested Logistics Environment Defined.” Army Sustainment. February 2024. army.mil
Zachary S. Hughes. “Giving Our ‘Paper Tiger’ Real Teeth.” Joint Force Quarterly 115. NDU Press. 2024. ndupress.ndu.edu