Morgenstern’s article, a revised and extended version of the 1951 RAND memorandum RM-614, proposes a conceptual groundwork for military logistics. Its purpose is to establish a consistent language in which operations can be described, compared, and eventually modeled. Successful practical performance does not establish that a logistical arrangement is economical or optimal: without theory, even apparently minor deficiencies offer little evidence about how much better an operation could have been. Comparative empirical investigation must therefore precede mathematical analysis, drawing on economics and organization theory without assuming that business experience transfers directly to military conditions.
A logistic operation consists in the supply of definite quantities of physical means and services for activities that according to their missions consume these means and services in order that the activities be maintained at particular present or expected future rates.
This definition makes logistics a relation between supply and the maintenance of an activity, rather than merely the movement of goods. Morgenstern organizes that relation around source, transportation, and consuming activity. A source can itself depend on another source, while each activity may draw upon several suppliers. Higher command authorities authorize rates of operation and can initiate supplies. The logistical problem is first to translate an intended activity into specific requirements, then to establish whether those requirements can be met within stated time limits and with a specified probability. Only once feasibility is established does the question of an optimum arise; the criterion might concern time, cost, tonnage, or their combination.
The article then develops distinctions that expose the inadequacy of treating supplies as independent quantities. Goods possess place and time values, but their military significance also depends on strategic circumstances that can change abruptly. Priorities translate these valuations into operational sequences, yet priorities assigned at different hierarchical levels may conflict. Morgenstern identifies the absence of a theory capable of reconciling them, especially when priorities must coexist with monetary valuations.
His distinction between “vanishing supplies” and “draining supplies” extends calculation beyond the initial shipment. The former disappear into consumption without further involving their source; the latter generate continuing requirements. Sending personnel or machinery commits the system to food, fuel, maintenance, and replacement parts. Whether a shipment creates such a drain also depends on circumstances, including the availability of local supplies.
To send only guns but no ammunition (when none is at the activity) is meaningless and wasteful.
Complementarity makes the usefulness of one delivery depend on others, whereas substitutability gives the source freedom to meet a requirement by alternative means. Draining supplies necessarily imply complementary requirements over time, but complementarity need not involve a continuing drain. Entire combinations, such as a gun and its ammunition, may themselves substitute for other combinations. Cataloguing these relationships would improve forecasting and reveal possibilities unavailable to local units. Standardized packages are useful, but excessive rigidity can conceal alternatives.
Morgenstern next considers the “compressibility” of requirements. Established standards of comfort, maneuverability, or maintenance are not invariably minimum necessities. They may be reduced, sometimes only temporarily, or approached through substitutions. Compression cannot proceed uniformly because dependencies among supplies must be preserved. Moreover, activities may inflate requests in anticipation of receiving only part of them.
Any treatment of logistics, whether purely descriptive or aiming to exact models, must take this role of probability into account.
Uncertainty thus concerns not only future consumption but the reliability and interpretation of reported demand. These considerations make the source an active decision point, combining production, storage, and judgment under higher authority. It must assess requests using information about stocks, goods in transit, operating rates, and expected future conditions. Better information techniques promise substantial gains, but continuity of records and personnel experience matter alongside technology. A technically improved communications system may also increase vulnerability to enemy action.
The comparison with business logistics sharpens this institutional argument. Firms benefit from accessible markets, price signals, and opportunities to correct supply errors outside their own organizations. Military systems must coordinate much larger, comparatively closed networks in which disturbances can propagate widely. Their activities also change with a suddenness rarely encountered in business: a battle can turn shortage into surplus within hours. Morgenstern’s contrast between market information resembling circulation through the bloodstream and military signals resembling the nervous system emphasizes the need for broadly available knowledge as well as directed commands.
There is, in any large organization, a great need for a flow of information that is not specifically directed to any part of it in order to secure spontaneous adaptive response to changing conditions.
The concluding sections turn these concepts into a research program. Line production offers empirically functioning arrangements from which theoretical insights might emerge, while Air Force Project SCOOP demonstrates progress in computing detailed requirements. Neither removes the need to describe actual military operations, locate bottlenecks, measure capacities, and reconcile military and economic terminology before collecting appropriate statistics. The eventual theory must explain equilibria, transitions between radically different operating levels, optimization, and the design of new organizations. The article’s central contribution is this ordering of inquiry: logistical calculation becomes meaningful only when embedded in an empirically described system of interdependent requirements, authority, uncertainty, and information.
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