Parallel military supply chain for resilience

ABSTRACT

The military supply chain (MSC) plays a crucial role in warfare – for the best chances for survival, it must be resilient. The current Republic of Korea (R.O.K.) military supply system is the “Substitute Model” in which the flow of military supplies moves from the general division (GD) to the logistic support center (LSC), and then moves to combat departments (CD). However, this model may not be adequate for improving resilience in military supply system. Thus, we designed the new “Parallel Model”. In the Parallel Model, both the GD and the LSC supply military materials to the CD during peace time and war time. We analyzed these two models’ critical factors in warfare – the supply line’s destruction ratio and the mean of demand using in-system dynamics simulation. The results showed that the Parallel Model was superior to the Substitute Model and suggest that the parallel supply model is a resilient and effective method in the MSC.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilient system
• military supply chain
• parallel structure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.