This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
Michael Hammer wrote a book about automation and the design of business processes that I read over 30 years ago while sitting by a pool in Boston, MA. The book was called Reengineering the Corporation. I loved it and I re-read it. I highlighted it, wrote on the pages, and today it looks like I attacked it. I also used it in my teaching and consulting. It was updated in 2003, but I never read that version.
Hammer wrote this book because organizations were laying new technology on top of processes designed for a pre-technology world. The result was incremental gains where step-changes were possible. Contested logistics today has the same problem.
Today's contested logistics conversation typically starts with the existing process (sustainment, distribution, prepositioning, convoy operations, port throughput) and asks how to harden, protect, or accelerate it under contested conditions. This is the equivalent of automating the existing workflow. It produces marginal improvements.
Given the sensors, autonomy, additive manufacturing, distributed energy, and AI-enabled demand signals we now have, and given the threats we now face, what would we design if we started from a blank sheet?
For example, the demand management process should go from periodic, hierarchical reporting to continuous, sensor-driven, AI-aggregated visibility. The inventory management process should go from large, fixed, targetable nodes to dispersed, mobile, partially virtual stockpiles (including print-on-demand at the edge). Movement (autonomous, multi-modal, deception-enabled flows) and decision rights (mission-command logistics with AI at the edge) are some of the many other possible examples.
Hammer was clear that reengineering fails most often not because of technology but because of organizational identity. The same is true here. Doctrine, force structure, acquisition timelines, and service equities are all built around the existing process. A blank-sheet redesign threatens all of them. That is precisely why incrementalism keeps winning.
Potential adversaries are not constrained by our legacy process. They are designing against the technology that exists today. If we only automate what we already do, we will be optimizing the wrong system faster. The work is not better contested logistics. It is a reengineered contested logistics.
I'm considering reading the updated version of the book that is only twenty-three years old.
