Army & Navy – LOGISTICS: Bomber Businessmen

Across a wintry Harvard quadrangle this week marched 151 singing Air Forces cadets to graduation exercises that made them Stat Control Officers, newest category of the Army Air Forces. They already had their orders for a new kind of field duty that is a cross between war and big business.

Behind them was training such as U.S. soldiers had seldom seen. Picked, from the Air Forces training school at Miami, they had been whisked to Harvard’s Graduate School of Business Administration, put through six weeks of courses ranging from statistical methods and analysis to pistol practice. There they had been fitted, at the inspiration of Lieut. General H. H. (“Hap”) Arnold, Chief of the USAAF, to apply the best technical methods of U.S. business to the Air Forces. Thus had the Air Forces made a new (and already successful) approach toward exactitude in a new, vastly complicated and swift-moving art: air logistics.

The Job. More than in any other service youth runs the Air Forces. Frequently a man in his early 20s commands a bombardment squadron worth $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 in equipment alone. Most have no business training, though each unit is a business which must turn in a profit. Once Arnold’s system is in full operation, a Stat officer will be attached to each Air Force unit down to the farthest squadron. By instituting a management-control system, General Arnold hopes to up those profits in terms of damage to the enemy and conservation of U.S. men and equipment. Each Stat officer records and analyzes weekly the status of: 1) planes (ready for combat, repairable, out of action); 2) personnel (number and types of training, casualties, replacement needs); 3) operations (type of mission, time, weather, degree of success, cost in men and equipment).

The Stat officer’s analysis guides his local commander. It is also sent direct to Air Forces G.H.Q. in Washington, where, in coordination with other reports, it provides an up-to-the-minute picture of U.S. air power, is invaluable in planning new operations, aircraft production and training schedules. In a matter of minutes, General Arnold can tell the status of AAF units all over the world. Red tape is eliminated by routing reports direct to G.H.Q., thus bypassing intervening officers.

In Washington a battery of classification machines sorts the reports in the same way big corporations keep track of their sales, production and personnel. At the touch of a button any kind of detailed information is available. Examples: how many technical sergeants with experience as navigators there are in the Air Forces, how many spare engines are on hand in Australia.

The Training. Early last March General Arnold tossed the problem of setting up such a system into the lap of a staff assistant, Colonel Byron E. Gates, promising his complete backing if there were squawks from traditionalists whose toes got stepped on. With the help of a statistics-minded young Texan, Lieut. Colonel Charles Thornton, he set to work. By mid-April the program had been set up, arrangements made with Harvard Business School to train cadets at $60 per man.

Cadets were given concentrated schooling on how the Air Forces are organized, methods of collecting and gauging statistics, analysis of personnel by function and training, military law, and a variety of related subjects. Most important, they were taught the importance of accurate statistical information to military logistics (i.e., the mathematical approach to supply and transport problems). By graduation day cadets had been thoroughly indoctrinated with the belief that there was nothing dull or unimportant about their strange new jobs. As Stat officers their tasks would be as vital to the winning of battles as pilots’ or gunners’.

The Practice. Effectiveness of the new system could not be gauged in the first months. Not until a Stat inspection officer visited a war theater did its sponsors find out. In Australia Lieut. General George Kenney, chief of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific, called the system “the answer to my prayers,” pleaded for more Stat officers.

In New Guinea, the inspector flew in to a jungle strip field set up in a swamp. Over one pup tent beside the field was a crudely painted sign: “Statistics Control Officer.” Although the job is classified as desk work, the inspector found few at desks, most seeing front-line action. Three Stat officers already had been killed. Working at desks at Harvard, young Stat cadets hopefully see the promise of combat medals in such a career, new as it may be.

Members of this week’s graduating class, sixth to go through the school, were assigned to England, Australia, many another combat zone, while a fresh group of cadets hustled to Harvard to learn methods for running airfighting on a business basis. In the field their seniors were already key figures in a vital art. For as even the new officer knows, it is logistics that wins wars.