The Army’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command is using artificial intelligence “to help us make better-informed decisions” for supply chain management in the Pacific, the unit’s commander said Friday.
“For logistics, a lot of what we do is very similar to what the commercial world does, and so I have leveraged, and we are leveraging commercial partners with, you know, how do they do warehouse management regionally, and then how do they look at, how do you time delivery of supplies to the location it’s needed, and kind of, what are those time-distance factors,” Maj. Gen. Gavin Gardner told reporters. “ I’m looking at partners, and I’m talking to partners that do that on a global scale, because the distances between the continental United States to the forward positions that we train or live at, like the Republic of Korea or Japan, we’re constantly looking for smarter ways to do that.”
“When resources are not unlimited, how do you best look at demand analysis over time and space, and stock forward the right things versus stocking everything? Because we just can’t afford to do that,” he said. “And so we’re using AI right now to help us see that.”
The command is also already using “very capable” autonomous watercraft in the Pacific and is working with industry to develop and test larger and faster vessels, Gardner said.
“We have industry partners that are creating vessels right now in the water that are over 100 feet long that would move anywhere between four and eight 20-foot equivalent units… think the containers you see moving up and down most of your ports today,” he said. “That capability is already in play, and it’s going through experimentation now, and the 8th TSC, along with the rest of the United States Army, is looking to partner, test, and innovate those autonomous watercraft first out in our region, because if you can work in the Pacific, you can work anywhere in the world.”
But the rules will need to evolve to keep up. Current U.S. maritime laws require a minimum crew size for vessels, limiting autonomous operations to testing or pilot programs for commercial use.
“We need to get the laws of the sea that our Coast Guard currently use to mandate watercraft operations that currently have to be manned when it enters into a port, that we’re comfortable having unmanned systems enter into ports, so that we can rapidly receive and download autonomous watercraft like we do manned watercraft today,” Gardner added.
Gardner said he’d also eventually like to see “anywhere between 30 and 100” medium-sized autonomous vessels in the U.S. Indo-Pacific theater, “berthed up everywhere from Korea to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Thailand,” to help meet the “constant demand for Army watercraft time now to deliver equipment and supplies in the theater.”
The unit has one Maneuver Support Vessel (Light), a manned landing craft that will eventually replace the Vietnam-era Landing Craft Mechanized-8, and has been testing it for about nine months to get data to shape the future design of the vessel. The vessel is nearly four times faster than the older watercraft, and much smaller—but also “much more capable” of operating in shallower water, Gardner said.
“So I’m actually going to different sets of beaches, and so you can put up to two HIMARS onto an MSV-Light, approach a beach very rapidly, bring it into position, download it, and then those platforms can get off and do their fire missions,” he said. “We’ve rehearsed this quite a bit with both the 25th Infantry Division and the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force,” and have also put multiple Marine NMESIS anti-ship systems onto the vessel for “rapid insertions.”
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