Logistics is Destiny: What Taiwan and the Pacific Theater Tell Us About Sustainment Warfare

As my co-author and I mentioned in an article here on The Havok Journal–and many others said long before us–Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics. But in the Pacific theater, where contested seas, long-range fires, and island chains define the battlespace, even professionals are relearning just how brutal the tyranny of distance can be.

If there’s a fight over Taiwan, it won’t look like Fallujah. It won’t even look much like Ukraine. It’ll be a war of sustainment: long, bloody, and slow, with the winner being the side that can out-resupply as much as outshoot. And if we’re honest, we’re not ready.

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The Ghost of Guadalcanal

We’ve seen this movie before. In 1942, it wasn’t airpower or maneuver that secured victory in the Pacific—it was logistics. The Marines held Guadalcanal by sheer tenacity. But that Semper Fi spirit was enabled by the Navy Seabees who built airstrips under fire, and Merchant Marines and Navy sailors who delivered fuel, food, and bullets through hellish seas. Battles were won not only by squads, companies, and battalions, but also by ships, cranes, and engineers.

Fast-forward 80 years, and the terrain hasn’t changed. The Pacific is still a maritime chessboard, and its pieces—tiny islands, chokepoints, and sea lanes—still dictate how wars are won. But now the stakes are higher, the threats faster, and the logistics far more fragile.

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Taiwan: The Ultimate Sustainment Test

In any Taiwan scenario, the first 72 hours will be chaos. After that, it becomes a war of attrition, and attrition runs on logistics.

Taiwan’s distance from Guam, Japan, and Hawaii means that sustaining operations will require an intricate ballet of prepositioned stocks, undersea cables, floating fuel farms, and forward-deployed contractors. China, on the other hand, has home-field advantage: shorter supply lines, domestic production, and a rail network that moves war like a conveyor belt.

We don’t just need ships. We need survivable sustainment: stealth tankers, unmanned supply drones, hardened warehouses, and dispersed fuel caches across the First Island Chain. That means rethinking the way we supply war—because the next fight won’t give us the luxury of a rear area.

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The Death of the Big Base

In Iraq and Afghanistan, our supply hubs were fortress-like megabases. In the Pacific, that’s suicide. Long-range precision fires from hypersonics to cruise missiles will turn big, static targets into smoldering craters.

The future is agile logistics: dispersed, mobile, and resilient. Think floating armories. Think modular refueling ships. Think MCAS-style pop-up airstrips on island atolls no one’s thought about since 1945. If you can’t move it or hide it, you’d better harden it—and even that might not be enough.

Commanders will need to make sustainment decisions with as much urgency as fire missions. That’s not just G4’s problem anymore. It’s the commander’s problem.

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Contractors, Cyber, and the Civilian Backbone

Let’s not forget the quiet engine of American military logistics: contractors. KBR, DynCorp, Amentum—they’ve been our sustainment lifeline for decades. But in a war with China, many contractors may not make it past insurance restrictions, cyber threats, or political pressure.

And speaking of cyber—our logistics systems are a soft underbelly. A single ransomware hit on a port scheduling network or GPS spoofing of a supply convoy could collapse a battalion’s combat power in hours.

Resilience isn’t just physical—it’s digital. We need redundant comms, analog backups, and a corps of cyber logisticians who can think like hackers and fight like quartermasters.

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Victory Goes to the One Who Keeps Fighting

In the end, wars are won by the side that doesn’t run out. Our of will. Out of weapons. Out of food. Out of fuel. Out of fight. That’s why logistics isn’t just a support function—it’s a strategic weapon.

We need to stop treating sustainment as an afterthought and start treating it like the operational priority it is. That means war-gaming logistics, budgeting for logistics, and yes—elevating logistics leaders to positions of real command influence.

If there’s a war in the Pacific, the first shots will be fired by missiles. But it will be won—or lost—by fuel bladders, supply ships, and forward-based Marines humping pallets off a beachhead.

Everything from the Peloponnesian War to Guadalcanal to Afghanistan taught us that logistics is destiny. Taiwan might remind us. The question is—will we be ready?

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Charles Faint served over 27 years in the US Army, which included seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units and two stints as an instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He also completed operational tours in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea and earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Temple University as well as a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University. He is the owner of The Havok Journal, and the views expressed herein are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.