Transportation and Logistics (Formerly Transportation, Global Agility) –
Distilled to its basic components, the transportation industry involves the movement of all types of goods, services, and people from one location to another, domestically and internationally. The flow of these goods is the essential substance of trade. It is also critical to the
national security of the U.S. The industry is essential to the industrial and innovation bases as well as mobilization; it has a number of sectors along with unique markets; and it presents strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities – not without threats.
A. Industrial & Innovation Bases and Mobilization
The transportation industry serves a dual role as both part of the NSIB and DIB and the means by which these bases support the rest of the critical and essential security-related industries. Transportation itself needs to be mobilized, organized, resourced, and sustained as an
industry in order for it to accomplish its historic mission of moving the products, output, and manpower of the U.S. to the sea and air ports of embarkation to deploy and project force around the world. Once deployed, this power needs to be sustained by that same transportation industry along these lines of communication. The 20th Century was the birth of the modern American transportation industry. The First and Second World Wars saw the mobilization of the Armed Forces and the development of the U.S. as the arsenal of democracy. The fruits of this arsenal were moved along rails, inland waterways, and overseas on the merchant marine fleet. The Vietnam War set the paradigm for the massive transport of troops and materiel via air for the first time – not supplanting rail and sea cargo movement but adding another dimension to the base. That war also witnessed and accelerated the rise of the shipping container. This now ubiquitous twenty-foot box (the genesis of the modern day twenty-foot equivalent unit, or TEU, standardized intermodal shipping container) revolutionized world trade and truly ushered in the
intermodal segment of the transportation industry.3 Today, the transportation industry stands ready to support the mobilization of America’s assets through airlift, sealift, inland waterway operations, long-haul trucking, rail, and intermodal operations.
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