How DLA exercises sustain the joint and combined force

The Defense Logistics Agency is reshaping the way it trains for war, launching an exercise campaign intended to harden the U.S. military’s supply lifelines against missiles, drones and cyberattacks while weaving DLA more tightly into combatant command drills across the globe.

Agency leaders say the effort answers a strategic shift in which adversaries are increasingly able to contest the movement of fuel, parts, food and other essentials that underpin U.S. power projection. Citing lessons from Ukraine and recent attacks in Southwest Asia, the campaign will scale from tabletop rehearsals to complex, live exercises with Joint and Service headquarters, stressing communications, distribution and industrial production under fire.

“For decades, most U.S. logistics activities were conducted in uncontested environments, but that strategic environment has changed. We are growing our capabilities, strengthening relationships with our allies and partners and coming at this challenge united, so logistics never becomes the weak link,” said U.S. Transportation Command’s Gen. Randall Reed in 2025.

The initiative sets three broad aims: build agency resilience for the most likely and most dangerous contested scenarios; inject more realism into Joint exercises by reducing logistics “abstraction”; and use those events to refine how and where DLA positions materiel and people for faster, more survivable support. Although DLA is not a warfighting organization, it plans to train headquarters staffs to operate like one so they can integrate at the speed of theater operations.

The push comes amid a rapidly expanding threat portfolio to the Joint Logistics Enterprise. Small first-person-view drones, loitering munitions and long-range, low-cost one-way attack systems have proliferated at scale; Russia’s war in Ukraine has shown how cheap, ubiquitous unmanned aircraft can achieve effects once reserved for traditional airpower. In Southwest Asia this spring, U.S. and allied logistics nodes faced salvos that mixed missiles with one-way attack drones. And in the cyber domain, Chinese doctrine calls for disabling the systems that knit U.S. forces together, with government-sponsored groups probing critical infrastructure and logistics networks. The U.S. intelligence community assesses that “China is the most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.”

Inside the Pentagon’s logistics coalition, DLA’s piece is strategic supply: nine enterprise-scale supply chains that span aviation and land and maritime parts; fuel; subsistence; clothing and textiles; construction and engineering materiel; medical supplies; and strategic materials. DLA links the national industrial base to depots and frontline units, while USTRANSCOM manages deployment and distribution—two sides of the same sustainment coin.

This year, the agency will embed in exercises supporting U.S. Northern Command, Strategic Command, Pacific Command and USTRANSCOM, while DLA regional commands work alongside European and Central Commands. Events such as Global Thunder and Keen Edge provide venues to test how quickly parts, fuel and medical materiel can move under degraded conditions, and to validate how DLA, the services and combatant commands share data and make decisions when comms are constrained.

The campaign is organized around four imperatives in DLA’s strategic plan—people, posture, precision and partnerships:

– People: The agency is institutionalizing contested-operations tradecraft, from practicing PACE (primary, alternate, contingency, emergency) communications to exercising continuity plans and alternate business practices when networks are under attack. Cyber realism—scaled red-team activity, social engineering drills and rehearsed workarounds—will be built into scenarios so operations can continue if primary systems are degraded.

– Posture: Planners will use exercises to test and refine how DLA stocks and stations materiel and personnel for time-relevant support, aligning with a new governance framework for contested logistics posture codified in the FY26 defense authorization. Longer-duration wargames will also probe how the organic and commercial industrial base can surge for months or years, and what happens when primary and secondary supply chains suffer disruptions.

– Precision: DLA is refining battle rhythms and decision forums to speed approvals and push authorities to the lowest appropriate echelon, while fielding decision-support tools atop a more resilient data fabric. Exercises will serve as milestones for integrating artificial intelligence into planning, forecasting and risk management, with a focus on anticipatory sustainment—especially for Pacific scenarios where distance and interdiction risks magnify delays.

– Partnerships: Agency leaders plan to deepen co-sustainment with allies and partners, including shared demand forecasting and data exchange, and to draw in private-sector suppliers early to map realistic paths for production surge. “Supercharge the Defense Industrial Base” is a core line of effort in the National Defense Strategy, and industry participation in exercises is intended to surface contract, policy and commodity bottlenecks before a crisis. As Undersecretary Michael Duffey put it in March, “The defense industrial base will determine whether we can deter our adversaries and if necessary, fight and win the wars of this generation and the next.”

Officials say early returns are visible. During recent major combat operations in Southwest Asia, DLA’s operations centers and working groups moved more smoothly and integrated more quickly with supported commands than in past crises, applying techniques honed in recent drills. The agency acknowledges more work is needed to meet its readiness goals, but argues that campaign-style training is already paying off.

The effort also spotlights the human dimension of sustainment, which senior leaders have been eager to elevate. “I want to highlight the unsung heroes of warfare…our American logisticians and sustainment force. Those who quietly work every day behind the scenes to project and sustain America’s combat power,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine this year.

For DLA, the end state is cultural as much as technical: to operate through disruption as a matter of habit and design, not exception, and to be ready to plug seamlessly into Joint and Combined headquarters when the pace turns unforgiving. As Caine said in a separate remark, “We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again…to ensure that we cannot get it wrong.”