CDR Salamander - So, Who Wants to do a REAL Exercise in the Philippines?

Is it a good idea to start the week with a nightmare? Of course it is.

All the cool kids like to talk about the “cyber domain” and the “digital battlespace.” Heck, we try to be cool ourselves here now and then…but there is something we don’t appreciate as much as we should.

We know that in 2026 we do not have enough strategic sealift nor enough strategic airlift to move what we need to move if we should find ourselves in a fight west of the International Date Line. Heck, we’re not that sure we can even do a much easier lift to Europe should things get sporty there for more than a punitive expedition.

During the latest Iran conflict, we did kind of smoke check our airlift capability…but we should be clear—the Iran strikes were just an exercise compared to what general war in the western Pacific or on continental Europe would demand.

Either would be a near run thing. We would have to pray that everything goes just right with the very unsexy things such as trucks, containers, trains, and the fuel that all of them need…before they even get to airlift and sealift.

Much of that feeding the large grey ships and aircraft aren’t just dual-use, it is mostly—in the U.S.A.—civilian.

Back to our nightmare.

When was the last time you talked to someone in the civilian logistics arena about their cyber security?

While you ponder that, give the following over at MWI a read, Mobilization as Deterrence: The Strategic Case for a Big Lift 2.0, by Jonathan Buckland.

He’s got your very believable nightmare.

When the deployment order is given, they pull the trigger. A cyberattack strikes the national rail network. Dispatching systems fail. Trains do not stop moving everywhere, but they stop moving predictably. Routes back up. Crews cannot be properly assigned. Rail yards become parking lots. Simultaneously, municipal water treatment facilities near major mobilization installations are compromised, and regional power grids feeding strategic ports fluctuate. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service is shut down; no soldier receives pay. The system is not physically destroyed; it is delayed, confused, and paralyzed just enough to ensure the US forces arrive too late.

At the same time, military logistic planners discover that there are not enough suitable railcars immediately available to move tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, recovery vehicles, artillery, engineering equipment, and sustainment platforms at the required scale. The brigades exist. The equipment exists. The will exists. But the transportation capacity does not.

Then a drone swarm from an offshore commercial vessel hits a major US port. It does not need to sink ships or destroy the entire facility. It only needs to inflict damage to cranes, fuel systems, rail connections, staging areas, or command-and-control nodes. One port becomes unusable. Another becomes overwhelmed with vehicles. A third has limited capacity for heavy military equipment. The problem compounds by the hour. The United States is now fighting a major battle mobilizing on its own soil before it can even deploy.

Convoys are delayed before they leave home station. Equipment stacks up at railheads. Ammunition movements are slowed by routing restrictions. Port call timelines collapse. Commercial carriers hesitate. Insurance costs spike. Civil authorities demand answers. Combatant commanders demand timelines. Allies demand reassurance. The president demands options. The standing military is ready to fight, but the nation is not ready to move it.

Like the old hippies used to ask,

Well, that’s not quite right. One side would arrive, rather quickly I would guess. It is just that, after sweeping aside the minor player, the other major player can’t arrive in any meaningful strength. The opposite of being the firstest-with-the-mostest, we’d be the lastest-with-the-leastest.

This is the brutal reality of peer war: The enemy does not have to defeat the joint force in Poland or Taiwan if it can prevent it from arriving in time, in mass, and with the sustainment required to endure. A peer adversary will not wait for American mobilization to unfold uncontested. It will attack the connective tissue of national power: rail, ports, power grids, cyber networks, fuel distribution, shipping capacity, industrial production, and political will.

In this scenario, deterrence fails not because America lacks soldiers, tanks, aircraft, or ships. It fails because the adversary correctly calculates that the United States cannot convert its military power into combat power fast enough under attack. Mobilization is no longer a rear-area administrative function. It is the opening campaign of modern war. The central question is no longer whether the United States possesses military power. It is whether the nation can convert that power into deployable combat capability under attack. The answer to that question will shape adversary decision-making long before the first shot is fired.

The larger nightmare would be that what few forces we could get forward would be too few and too under-supported, arriving in drips and drabs, if at all. It would be Corregidor and Singapore all over again.

It doesn’t have to be this way. All we need to do is be brutally honest with ourselves. No happy talk. No mindless FITREP bullet writing mindset. Just cold, hard truth—followed by corrective action.

Buckland has a solid idea. Remember a little over three years ago we called again for a new REFORGER?

Buckland has an even better idea.

In 1963, the United States conducted Operation Big Lift—a strategic message to Moscow. More than fifteen thousand American soldiers deployed from the United States to West Germany in a matter of days, demonstrating the nation’s ability to rapidly reinforce NATO during the height of the Cold War. The exercise reassured allies, strengthened deterrence, and showcased America’s strategic reach. Yet Big Lift was conducted under conditions that no longer reflect the realities of modern warfare. Personnel flew to Europe, where equipment was already waiting. Transportation networks were uncontested, communications were secure, and the exercise assumed a level of strategic sanctuary that future conflicts are unlikely to provide. Even Operation Desert Shield in 1990, the largest American strategic deployment since World War II, shows us only what mobilization looked like when strategic sanctuary still existed.

As the title of his article says, Big Lift 2.0: now more than ever.

Big Lift 2.0, a deliberately planned and executed national stress test, would fundamentally redefine military deployment exercises by shifting the baseline operational question from Can we move soldiers? to the realistic, contested challenge of Can we mobilize a corps while an adversary actively attempts to stop us? To execute a national-level stress test of this magnitude, the Department of Defense must transition from dangerously optimistic peacetime assumptions to a realistic, contested operational framework. This requires a progressive crawl-walk-run training campaign. Within the next five years, the military should operationalize these requirements by executing a senior-leader tabletop exercise as the crawl/walk phase, followed by a physical, corps-level deployment as the run phase.

The campaign begins with a national mobilization tabletop exercise designed to stress-test senior leadership across the interagency and commercial sectors without the immediate logistical burden of physically moving heavy brigades. This exercise would gather key stakeholders including Army commands, US Transportation Command, the United States Maritime Administration, commercial rail operators, port authorities, the Department of Homeland Security, and allied partners to navigate the deployment of an armored corps within thirty to forty-five days against a peer adversary.

Planners would have to navigate hard, asymmetric friction injectors modeled after real-world threat vectors. This includes Volt Typhoon–style cyber disruptions targeting civil power grids, municipal water systems feeding power-projection platforms (installations), and commercial port control systems. To succeed, leaders would have to answer complex questions regarding railcar prioritization, manual and analog port operations, and emergency civil-military coordination when primary power, communications, and utility systems fail. The required end state of this tabletop is not a standard briefing, but a rigorous assessment of national mobilization gaps that directly informs a funded, actionable mobilization campaign plan.

Once the strategic and interagency decision-making frameworks are validated, the military must transition to the run phase: a comprehensive, physical mobilization exercise that tracks a corps-level force through five progressively contested phases:

Yes, all of this—yes. Head on over if you have not already and give it a full read.

Would this be expensive? Hell yes, but it would be the best investment we could make.

…and I would do it with almost no notice.

Make it the 21st century version of 1941’s Louisiana Maneuvers. The Philippines would be the perfect place to host the exercise

Find the weaknesses in your equipment, thinking, everything…but especially in your people.

Want to find out where the gundecking has been in logistics? This is a great way to start to find it. Want to purge senior leaders who got where they are by overselling themselves and maneuvering around challenges as opposed to fixing them? This won’t catch all of them, but I would wager a plurality of them. Fear and shame are great motivators.

Just make sure no one can PCS between the exercise announcement and the completion of the debrief.

In parallel, I’d red-team all IT in the companies and infrastructure we will have to rely on should war come.

Learn what is not ready for game day. Fix what we can, then have a primary, backup, and ready spare capability.

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