Fighting China, Fast and Slow
The Real Logistics Challenge in the Taiwan Strait
More than 80 years after Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, D-Day is frequently referred to in discussions of potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Western observers often cite that historic event to highlight the formidable challenge that China’s military would face in launching an amphibious assault on Taiwan. Chinese analysts and military planners also study the Normandy landing campaign closely, looking for insights into logistics for their air and sea forces.
But the United States should learn another lesson from D-Day: how to keep U.S. forces supplied under fire without relying on fixed infrastructure. In June 1944, Allied forces landed hundreds of thousands of troops and vehicles and tons of materiel on fortified beaches, secured a defensible position, and pushed inland—all without access to a single major port. What made this feat possible were cheap gliders that delivered troops and cargo too heavy for parachutes, and artificial harbors that kept the beachhead supplied. Those disposable logistics tools provided the speed and flexibility needed when permanent infrastructure and traditional supply methods such as large transport convoys became liabilities, and when delay could have proved fatal.
Today, in the event of war in East Asia, China could cut off supply lines across the vast Pacific, potentially isolating U.S. forces. The solution, as in Normandy in 1944, is innovative, temporary logistics. The United States should invest in expendable and autonomous systems, such as disposable cargo drones and one-way gliders, which use programmed routes and onboard sensors to keep forces stocked with ammunition, fuel, food, and other supplies during the critical early stage of a conflict. As China depleted its missile arsenal attacking disposable logistics tools, U.S. and allied forces could turn to more permanent infrastructure to deliver supplies by air and sea.
Temporary logistics might seem wasteful, but the alternative—attempting to maintain peacetime standards of logistical efficiency in the opening phase of a conflict—risks the type of supply failures that have decided countless wars throughout history. Beijing understands this well: authoritative texts about military strategy published by the People’s Liberation Army identify logistics as a vulnerability that China can exploit to paralyze an adversary’s forces. Strengthening U.S. deterrence in the Indo-Pacific therefore requires the ability to deploy fast, flexible, and cheap logistical resources at the outset of a conflict, which can complement traditional, centralized logistics systems required for protracted operations. This approach combines speed and staying power, ensuring that the United States can repel initial Chinese aggression and prevail in a longer war.
Lessons from Normandy
The D-Day invasion succeeded because Allied planners reimagined logistics at scale while under fire. In the predawn hours of the invasion, hundreds of gliders delivered paratroopers and equipment behind enemy lines. Constructed from wood and canvas, these gliders were cheap, required no fuel, and needed neither runways nor return flights, making them ideal for delivering heavy weapons and supplies that parachutes alone could not handle. When German antiaircraft fire intensified, the Allies simply sent more gliders and airborne troops. They accepted the attrition of intentionally disposable gliders—as well as the risk to airborne personnel and their equipment—as necessary to achieve the operation’s objectives.
While gliders deposited troops and materiel behind enemy lines during the invasion’s opening hours, temporary, mobile harbors—known as Mulberries—addressed the urgent need to rapidly fortify forces to repel the inevitable German counterattack. Prefabricated in England and assembled under fire off the beaches of Normandy, each Mulberry was engineered to handle 5,000 tons of cargo and 1,400 vehicles daily. The installation at Arromanches, for example, moved tens of thousands of tons of food, ammunition, vehicles, and other supplies daily, sustaining Allied forces during their most vulnerable period in the landing.
These logistical innovations proved decisive. Within two weeks of D-Day, more than one million Allied troops were ashore in France. Once the beachhead was secure, the Allies began to repair ports, build pipelines, and extend railways. But were it not for gliders and Mulberries, the Allies would never have gotten ashore. As U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander during the operation, said of these temporary logistical measures, “Without them our armies could not have been adequately maintained in the field.” It was a phased approach—fast and improvisational at first; steady and deliberate later.
Logistics Under Fire
Deterring potential Chinese action in the Taiwan Strait poses logistical challenges even more daunting than those the Allies faced in Normandy. The People’s Liberation Army has spent two decades developing anti-access/area-denial capabilities, known as A2/AD—including long-range missiles, maritime militias, and cyberweapons—that the Pentagon says are specifically designed to disrupt and destroy American and allied supply lines. China’s long-range missiles can strike airfields, ports, and supply depots across the Pacific, and PLA cyberattacks threaten the communications networks and digital systems that undergird U.S. and allied military logistics. A recent Stimson Center analysis found that, in the opening phase of a potential conflict, Chinese missiles could render U.S. bases and airfields in Japan and Guam inoperable for days or weeks, grounding cargo aircraft essential for resupply. Logistical delays can break an operation by denying the one resource that can never be recovered: time. And time is exactly what China needs to take control of Taiwan. Effective logistics, therefore, underwrites credible U.S. deterrence.
The U.S. military has responded to this challenge by shifting away from maintaining large regional bases and toward stationing forces across numerous smaller, often remote locations. This approach, which is called distributed operations, maximizes U.S. forces’ ability to withstand precision strikes. But it also significantly increases the complexity of logistical coordination, creating new possibilities for failure. Consider the Marine Corps’ new stand-in force concept, which involves deploying small, mobile units that carry minimal supplies and require frequent resupply. As General David Berger, then commandant of the Marine Corps, acknowledged in May 2022, sustaining stand-in forces requires “logistics capabilities designed for distributed operations over long distances in a contested environment”—that is, more aircraft, more ships, more support personnel, and better planning to maintain vulnerable supply lines.
Today, conventional methods are insufficient to protect the United States against Chinese weapons. Large cargo aircraft and container ships—the backbone of traditional military logistics—become prime targets in contested environments. A 2022 wargame highlighted this dilemma, noting that it was unclear how the military would execute joint logistics across widely dispersed U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific theater.
FLEET-FOOTED
Modern technology offers a path forward, allowing the United States to reimagine D-Day’s legacy of disposable logistics for the Indo-Pacific. Like the gliders and Mulberry harbors that initially sustained Allied forces in Normandy, today’s autonomous logistics systems can bridge initial operations and protracted conflict. These systems would need to be cheap enough to be expendable, small enough to minimize their value as targets, and numerous enough to ensure success despite individual losses.
Emerging technologies are well suited to the task. Reinvented gliders, now built from stronger materials such as carbon fiber reinforced polymers, incorporate autonomous navigation systems that can avoid obstacles, select landing zones, and deliver supplies to remote or contested locations. The U.S. Air Force has tested lightweight cargo gliders capable of delivering 1,000 pounds of supplies up to 40 miles. At roughly $40,000 each, these are inexpensive enough to be disposable. By comparison, a single C-130J, a traditional cargo aircraft used by the air force, costs about $110 million.
In an Indo-Pacific conflict, modern gliders could deliver supplies nightly to marines in remote locations, much as wooden gliders sustained Allied paratroopers in Normandy. But today’s aircraft can do so with a level of precision and reliability that was not possible in 1944.
Autonomous cargo aircraft and ships can also reshape temporary logistics. Last year, for example, the air force successfully tested modified Cessna 208B Caravans, common single-engine turboprop planes, which used automated takeoff and landing systems to deliver supplies to eight remote locations spread across 1,150 miles. Rather than relying on large transport planes, the air force could use numerous smaller aircraft able to land on shorter and narrower runways to deliver supplies to dispersed units. The same idea applies to larger, autonomous drones capable of moving oversize loads long distances. These aircraft could play the role that Mulberries did in Normandy, facilitating temporary supply lines where none previously existed.
Similarly, autonomous surface vessels, such as uncrewed boats, could deliver one or two standard shipping containers of fuel, food, and ammunition to scattered forces with no need for a large port. Across the many islands of the Indo-Pacific, a large fleet of these autonomous vessels could provide near-continuous resupply while larger cargo vessels remained at a safe distance from Chinese attacks. Traditional military cargo ships, in contrast, are unsuited for these missions because they are too few in number, vulnerable to attack, and dependent on ports.
The most revolutionary approach would employ swarming logistics, in which the U.S. military launches dozens or hundreds of small, cheap drones persistently, or in waves, to overwhelm China’s ability to selectively target the most valuable cargo. Because of their sheer quantity, these drones create uncertainty about the value of any single target, especially when the cost of intercepting them exceeds the value of what might be onboard. If China attempts to intercept them, the United States benefits by accelerating the depletion of China’s costly and limited antiaircraft missiles. If China opts not to engage, the resupply mission succeeds. As with flying waves of gliders through intense antiaircraft fire, adopting these tactics requires accepting that there will be attrition as China shoots down some drones. But these losses are necessary to impose costs on Chinese defenses.
THE LONG HAUL
None of these expendable logistics systems could or should permanently replace traditional supply methods. In the case of a drawn-out war over Taiwan, the battle for control of the air and sea is likely to eventually shift in favor of more powerful U.S. and allied forces. China’s cruise and ballistic missile arsenal is extensive, but it is not unlimited. As those weapons are exhausted, the conflict will return to the type of warfare that can use traditional logistics methods, including large cargo ships, aircraft, and fixed infrastructure. But to reach that point, the United States will first need disposable logistics as a stopgap, buying time in the initial stages when conventional networks are under attack and secure supply lines have yet to be established. Like Mulberry harbors and D-Day gliders, these systems prioritize immediate effectiveness over long-term efficiency.
Meeting this challenge demands fundamental changes in how the Pentagon thinks about conflict in the Indo-Pacific. The United States should ensure that expendable systems are readily available in meaningful quantities. At present, the United States and its allies severely underinvest in both traditional logistical capabilities, such as airlift and sealift cargo platforms, and in disposable systems. For example, most of the Ready Reserve Force’s so-called roll-on, roll-off vessels, which can transport wheeled vehicles and are essential to large-scale military deployments, were primarily built in the 1970s, with some dating to the early 1960s. To ensure the viability of its aging logistics fleet in the Indo-Pacific, Washington should pursue development and production of scalable, expendable capabilities in partnership with key regional allies such as Australia and Japan. Disposable logistics based close to the theater of operations would reduce production delays and ease the strain on already limited logistics capacity.
The United States should also support, and the U.S. military should embrace, the emerging commercial market for lower-cost, autonomous cargo aircraft and ships. Neither the United States nor its allies can afford to stockpile large quantities of expendable systems that sit idle in peacetime, especially since the technology for autonomy, swarming, and propulsion evolves rapidly. What is state of the art today is often obsolete tomorrow. Instead, Washington should partner with private industry to prepare for the swift adoption of autonomous logistics systems for military use. Several U.S. firms are already developing small cargo drones designed to conduct resupply missions across the Indo-Pacific, which could be used in the initial fight.
The United States needs to clear regulatory and policy obstacles that hinder commercial adoption of these systems in the air and at sea. Although the Federal Aviation Administration has proposed a rule that would allow drones to deliver small packages in the United States, implementation remains uncertain, and the proposed rules severely restrict the size of drones and cargo. China, by contrast, has already normalized drone delivery and established dedicated corridors for commercial operations, including for large cargo drones capable of delivering at scale. The United States has fallen behind China in commercial shipbuilding and is unlikely to regain its dominance in that market, but it has an opportunity to lead in autonomous logistics. The more the United States invests now, the greater its capability to deter and, if necessary, fight a protracted conflict with China.
U.S. policymakers must accept that investing in deliberately temporary systems is essential, not wasteful. During the critical first weeks of any major Pacific conflict, container ships will not be able to dock at ports within range of China’s weapons, and large aircraft will not be able to land at contested bases. Instead, the U.S. military will need to deploy autonomous drones and expendable systems. The war in Ukraine, in which units on both sides have used drones to deliver ammunition to frontline units, demonstrates the value of such approaches.
Expendable and autonomous logistics systems would strengthen U.S. deterrence by overcoming what we call the “four tyrannies”—time, distance, water, and scale—that threaten American power projection in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing’s strategy depends on exploiting these tyrannies to seize Taiwan before the United States can bring sufficient military force to bear. By targeting the few islands suitable for large-scale logistics operations, China can slow any U.S. response. But by demonstrating the ability to sustain dispersed forces under missile attack with expendable gliders, cargo drones, and swarming logistics, the United States can undermine China’s confidence in its A2/AD capabilities.
Deterrence depends on not just the number of bombers, submarines, and destroyers but also the ability to keep forces supplied—even when conventional logistics breaks down. As on the beaches of Normandy in 1944, logistics itself can be a decisive weapon in battle. Failing to invest in these capabilities signals unpreparedness or dangerous overconfidence that there will be time to adapt once war begins. Reliable and effective logistics is crucial in any war—and especially so when that war is half a world away.