By David Beaumont

This article, and the series which follows, are an updated version of a presentation given at the Australian National University titled ‘Logistics preparedness and mobilising the national support base: the effectiveness of ADF strategic logistics prior to Operation Warden 1999‘.

This year we celebrate the 25^th anniversary of the International Force East Timor (INTERFET) peacekeeping mission in East Timor. The historiography of the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) performance during Operation Warden portrays operational success as being despite severe strategic logistics limitations. The September 1999 deployment was the largest faced by the ADF since the Second World War, and at its peak, an under-resourced ADF was supporting an over 10000 peacekeeping force in East Timor. The ADF may have done better, as history and anecdote goes, had it not been victim of budgetary pressure, and commercialisation and downsizing agendas progressed over the preceding twenty years. Equally, these anecdotes present the ADF experience as one defined by collective complacency and hubris at a policy level. These views may be correct, but anecdotes are no replacement for the detailed study of what went wrong and – more importantly – why. While acknowledging that the ADF’s preparedness prior to Operation Warden declined over time, few have explored exactly how or why such inferior performance manifested.

It’s quite widely known, now, that the ADF’s success as the leader of a peacekeeping coalition in East Timor was a success achieve despite its logistics performance, rather than because of it. The INTERFET force was deployed and sustained by a force patently ill-designed and resourced for an operation so critically important for Australia, yet one few had ever thought might actually eventuate. Twenty-five years on, we still know little about the systemic failures in the ADF’s approach to strategic logistics and the consequences this had on operations. This series of articles aims to address this gap by showing how logistics problems accumulate and metastasise into operational preparedness shortcomings. In doing so, it aims to reveal issues that may be relevant to planners and policy makers even today.

Historians would likely view the ADF’s experience as unexceptional given logistics factors are often brought to the fore in the ‘unpreparedness’ of many militaries in their preparations for wars or operations. Martin Van Creveld’s book Supplying War is perhaps the most famous critique of the typically ad hoc approaches to organisation, preparedness and logistics that characterise military performance, but he’s been followed by many more. How can we ever judge what effective logistics actually looks like? 

Thomas Kane, in Military logistics and strategic performance, considered logistics to be a ‘slippery beast that can become important at many levels of an operation, sometimes as a cause of events and other times a consequence of them’. However, and in contrast to Martin Van Creveld who felt that militaries attempts to be logistically prepared were ‘futile at best’, Kane attested that the relationship between logistics and operational consequences was clear. Logistics, according to Kane, is an ‘arbiter of opportunity’, but not an ‘all or nothing proposition’ – incompetence does not automatically result in operational failure, nor resourcing pre-ordain success.

Why, then, should we bother studying the logistics-related issues pertaining to operations in East Timor if such issues are to be expected? Instead, as is the intended purpose for the study of most military histories, we must come at the topic from the position of seeking improvements, to learn from the experiences of others, such that we can avoid the problems that otherwise have an awful tendency of repeating.

What are we talking about?

Military terminology changes frequently, and you might note that Defence – in 2023 – doesn’t have an agreed upon definition for what strategic logistics is, nor what logistics at the ‘strategic level’ of war entails. Interestingly, and largely because definitions are essential as a signpost to organisational responsibilities and accountabilities in institutions, the ADF seemed to have a clearer conception of what strategic logistics meant in the 1980s and 1990s where contestation about roles and responsibilities in logistics was rife. To better contextualise logistics in the ADF during the period to be examined, it makes sense that I draw upon the definitions of that period as well.

The first comes from an organization known as the National Support Division which, in 1998, saw:

“In a general sense, [strategic logistics is] the art and science of harnessing the economic and societal strengths of a nation for national defense. In the specific sense, strategic logistics is the process for planning for, coordinating, and allocating the manpower, materiel, infrastructure, and services required for military, war production, and civil sector needs. It requires coordination between the executive and legislative branches, state governments and industry. Force generation and mobilisation are inclusive components of strategic logistics.

Another, complementary idea comes from a partner organization of the time – Support Command Australia. Rather than defining strategic logistics, it instead gives a sense of the activities strategic logistics entails.

 “Logistics at the strategic level provides the foundation for the mobilisation, deployment, sustainment, redeployment and demobilisation of combat forces. It is particularly concerned with logistic policy and regulations, budgets and programs, the procurement of materiel and services, materiel management including reserve stockholdings, ASA (Australian Support Area) infrastructure construction and maintenance, and involvement with wider national and international sources of support, especially industry. It is especially concerned with the preparedness of the combat force.”

These definitions, considered together, help us to better identify success and failure when it comes to the logistics performance of the ADF during Op Warden.

What do we know?

The research from which this article, and those which follow it, is concerned with preparedness and its relationship to the ADF’s strategic logistics performance, and the period of time which led up to Operation Warden rather than the events during it. There is consensus that the ADF was unprepared for the operation. This fact has been so widely reported that it could be considered rote – indeed the lessons of this operation have been regularly drawn upon as an example of the challenge faced by Australia in assuming coalition leadership, and the logistics responsibilities therein. In opening this series of articles, its worth noting what some of the most significant reviews of the ADF’s performance found.

The 2000 agenda for the seniormost ADF committee, the Chiefs of Service Committee, was all but consumed with lessons learned from East Timor, with item 23/00 now regarded as seminal in terms of the description of the ADF’s logistics problems in the operations. This review of logistics performance was led by the heads of two strategically-focussed logistics organisations of the ADF and has been regarded as somewhat of an opportunistic attempt to garner support for capability investment into logistics in the ADF. That being said, the committee paper was an important start to a wave of analysis, introspection and problem solving which occurred soon after the INTERFET forces returned home.

The report of the Australian National Audit Office 38/2002, a report that has been described as ‘scathing’, similarly highlights a large number of logistics concerns. Many of these concerns would feed into later studies of ADF preparedness, or debates about structure and organisational depth in the ADF. This report, because of its availability, has been often cited and its opinions presented in histories of Operation Warden.

General Peter Cosgrove, commander of INTERFET, describes the problem as being that the ADF had simply not been designed ‘with a responsive and effective logistics system’ – the ADF was not in a position to support a force of nearly 10000 troops over a six month period, but did, with difficulties.

Both quotes allude to logistics problems being a consequence of deficits in capability, and that the ADF was not oriented to the problem which ultimately befell it. These are, however, very general comments that only scratch the surface of what went wrong.

Fortunately, we can now draw upon The Official History for Operation Warden for a level of insight well beyond incidental reports and research thesis and papers available. The History necessarily focusses on the events of the time of the operation, and the project did not have the latitude nor time to examine how the inevitability of logistics problems ultimately manifested. The History, however, makes it quite clear that there was much more to the failures in the ADF’s approach to logistics.

Professor Craig Stockings, the Official Historian, all but confirms the often-expressed logistics problems. There was a ‘yawning gap between advertised and actual capability’ and ‘new systems were raised on the run which led to uncertainty about authority and responsibility.’ Stockings also notes that the lessons learned from the operation were somewhat coopted in arguments to ‘win resources’, even though the ADF was poorly prepared in terms of its logistics ‘structures, systems and processes’.

But it is worth emphasising that Stockings was left with a feeling that logistics issues were poorly understood at the time, and that something wasn’t quite right in the ADF– that much is evident in the quotes here. The ADF had found itself in a position where it possessed a logistics ‘system’ that simply wasn’t designed to do what was asked of it.

Conclusion

There are important reasons why we should take the time, at the 25^th anniversary of Operation Warden, to delve deeply into the circumstances of the mission. There’s more to tell about the preparedness of the ADF prior to Operation Warden, especially from the context of ADF logistics, and there’s yet to be a comprehensive portrayal of the why one thing led to another, resulting in the experiences of chaos of 1999.

The fact that the ADF’s logistics problems appeared after thirty years of strategic and industry policy development, planning, reform, intervention, restructuring and efficiency-seeking plays to the notion of incompetency on the part of the ADF, and Defence in general. That’s an easy answer, as well as being a naive one at that! There are, of course, a range of factors that compromised the ADF’s preparedness and logistics support to the operation. Some of these factors were well beyond the ability of the military to influence and were long-term problems that systematically undermined the ADFs logistics capability and capacity over two decades. So we must look at history without apportioning blame, or criticizing the work of others, but undertake research in the spirit of making things better – learning from the past to prevent similar outcomes in the future.