U.S. Military Services Master Logistics With Cloud Power

“Real-time monitoring of supply and demand, and automated responses to those metrics, enable organizations to automate the optimization of inventory and material shipments,” says Joe Ohr, COO of the National Motor Freight Traffic Association.

This in turn helps organizations to “minimize costs and maximize availability of critical resources in the right markets, at the right time,” Ohr says.

How the Cloud Contributes to Greater Operational Visibility

The Army has turned to both the Azure and Amazon Web Services cloud to support of its logistics modernization efforts.

“We typically have a prime contractor, and they get parts from different suppliers and subcontractors,” says Jennifer Swanson, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for data, engineering and software.

Those suppliers have worked to give the Army better visibility into their operations, and now the cloud is helping make sense of what they report, Swanson says: “The power of the cloud compute capability is really to be able to take that second- or third-order analysis to understand, are we going to have a problem in a year? Is production slowing down at this part? Are components coming from places that we don’t want them to come from?”

“Being able to leverage cloud compute, along with potentially some AI capabilities and other software capabilities, we will really have full visibility into our supply chain,” she says.

That same power is helping the Army secure its software supply chain, a key priority as the military looks to ensure its emerging applications are cybersecure.

The software bill of materials pulls together data on the sources of software, “and if you add the power of cloud compute to that, you can use that to do a lot of analysis on the SBOMs, particularly in open source, where we otherwise don’t have visibility into who contributed,” Swanson says.

The Navy is moving in the same direction. In 2023, it announced a proof of concept that marries artificial intelligence and cloud computing to improve food availability in support of fleet readiness.

“This project provides global, end-to-end commodity management,” says Rear Adm. Julie Treanor, director of fleet ordnance and supply at U.S. Fleet Forces Command. “It collates all of the supplier data ashore, and all unit data afloat for all of the units that represent the hubs and spokes of our warfighting capability.”

In support of this effort, the Navy runs Jupiter, a dedicated space within Advana (the Defense Department’s enterprise analytics environment), on the AWS cloud. “Having that cloud resource gives us the extra compute we may need. It enables scaling, taking on more and more use cases,” says Lt. Cmdr. Taylor Shipley, USFFC fleet services officer.

“That ability to scale is important as more opportunities arise,” Shipley says. “We’re a global force. We’re trying to solve it for the global Navy, and having easy access to that data and sharing that data are key.”

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“Our No. 1 mission is ensuring operational readiness,” Treanor says. In support of that, the combination of cloud and AI offers “the ability to identify patterns in an informed fashion, so that we can make some predictions and create future opportunities.”

Managing Maintenance Supply Chain Data

The Air Force Sustainment Center must manage the many parts and processes that support aircraft maintenance. “We have industrial plant equipment that runs 24/7 at multiple locations, three major sustainment centers and multiple geographically separated units,” says Joshua Thompson, a former IT specialist and enterprise architect for AFSC.

Those facilities together produce vast volumes of data that need to be analyzed in support of efficiency and productivity. With its AFSC Technology Hosting Environment for NextGen Automation (ATHENA) program, the sustainment center taps the power of the cloud to keep that supply chain strong.

USAF needed a modernized way to pull together all of the data describing its maintenance supply chain.

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“When you’re trying to make business-driven decisions, by the time that manual data makes it off the shop floor, a machine tool may have had a breakdown, spindle speeds may be off, or machine tools may be underutilized,” Thompson says.

For faster insights, the Air Force relies on AWS Outposts — a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, services, application programming interfaces and tools to customer locations — and Cloud One, AWS’s cloud security platform.

“The Air Force Sustainment Center is on a mission to use this platform to better connect, secure and enhance depot operations, ultimately sponsoring a more robust and cybersecure supply chain,” Thompson says.

With ATHENA, “all of these pieces of operational technology can stream their information to a cloud data source,” says John York, a solutions adviser at AFSC. “We can take advantage of those cloud technologies for analytics data, real-time data analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning — all of those things that we’re pushing toward with depot modernization.”