Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Logistics will Make or Break Your Emergency Management Efforts

Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.  That is a military maxim that applies to endeavours emergency management.  It’s easy to concentrate on tactics: the front line, where the rubber meets the road.  It’s easy to forget that there is no rubber and no gas in the engine without the right logistics behind the effort.  In fact, without the right logistics behind the effort, you’re just going to get a serious case of road rash.

“Road Rash: (n) abrasion from sliding on pavement after a crash”

I’ve been reading a book titled “Supplying War”, written by Martin Van Creveld.  It is an interesting investigation into the nature of logistics from the 1560 through to 1945 in terms of its impact on what could be, and what was, accomplished in European wars throughout that timeframe.  I have long read books on the tactics and strategies undertaken in different eras of warfare, but this is the first time I have begun to delve into the logistics behind the scenes.

The overriding message?  Logistics and logistic capability dramatically constrains what you can do – sometimes in an obvious manner, and sometimes in the most insidious of details that would not occur to someone not intimately familiar with the conditions on the ground.

Armies march on their stomachs, yes, but did you know that until the modern era, the constraining factor was actually feeding your horses?  Men were easy to feed – they ravaged the land that they marched over.  And did you know that the railways used prior to and during WW1 were, in fact, basically useless because of bottlenecks at the railheads where supplies were offloaded?

Details matter.  And unfortunately, logistics is a big bag of details that people don’t like to think much about.  It is, however, vitally important for a leader to think about because it is the very thing that, perhaps more than the situation at hand, most constrains your choices.

Let’s look at the recent public health response to the pH1N1 virus, shall we?  I can speak best about Ontario, since that is where my experience has been.  Ontario, like the other provinces in Canada, had a plan to roll out mass quantities of H1N1 vaccine to the public.  But while it sounds like it would have been a flood of vaccines like a remake of the Shock & Awe campaign in Iraq, the reality was something far less dramatic.

What the logistics chain – one that extended back to the vaccine manufacturer itself – was able to support was having everyone vaccinated by Christmas.  It was, by all accounts, a mammoth undertaking to get millions of Ontarians vaccinated in less than 6 weeks, but the overall timeframe was measured in months, not weeks.  That was a logistics issue.

However, things didn’t go smoothly.  The manufacturer ran into production difficulties right when public demand was highest – right when people wanted the vaccine, we weren’t able to get it out to everyone.  Some flu vaccination clinics even ran out of vaccines and had to close for a day or two at the height of the demand curve.  And Canada had only one supplier, so there were no other options other than to wait for the supplier to get things ironed out and back up to speed.  That was a logistics issue.

The Province wanted to start getting family doctors involved in the vaccination effort.  But at that time, vaccines were only available in 500-dose batches.  The Provincial warehouses who distributed the vaccines to public health units, who then distributed to doctors and clinics, dealt only with Costco-sized packages when family doctors really only needed regular supermarket-sized, or even convenience store-sized packages.  So, the Province had to scramble to repackage the vaccines into smaller 100-dose batches.  Again, this was a logistics issue.

Tactics are flashy.  Strategy is sexy.  Logistics is the ugly miscreant standing in the back, like Quasimodo on a bad day.  You can think up great strategy and design creative tactics, but if you don’t pay proper and sufficient attention to logistics, you’re asking for trouble.  Logistics isn’t sexy and can be a real pain in the ass to just look at, much less deal with.  But as they say, the devil is in the details – and logistics is pretty much the devil’s playground when it comes to putting rubber on the road and making things happen.

Pay attention to logistics.  If you don’t, it’s not just you who has to pay for it, but also the people you’re supposed to be helping.