Camoland Clothing and Textile Industrial Base Wargame Report

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) Strategic Plans and Futures Directorate tasked CNA to examine the domestic clothing and textile (C&T) industrial base (IB) as part of its broader campaign of learning. In October 2023, CNA conducted the CAMOLAND wargame. The game allowed participants from government and industry to engage with and understand the challenges that the C&T IB faces during a full-scale mobilization of the US military. The wargame scenario explored overlapping contingency operations in the High North and the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) areas of responsibility. CNA designed the wargame to meet the following objectives:

• Identify constraints, bottlenecks, and limitations within the C&T supply chain
• Understand the prioritization of material production and distribution
• Apply lessons learned from minor to moderate contingency events to large-scale conflicts
• Prioritize potential IB investments and modifications to Department of Defense (DOD) business operations

Key findings

This wargame leveraged modeling, discussions with industry representatives, and other analytic techniques to understand how bottlenecks occur in supply chains, their implications, and mitigating options that the DLA and DOD can take. Key insights included the following:

• Supply chains have a fundamental “speed limit” to ramping up. Supply chain bottlenecks occur when a company runs out of staff, materials, or equipment, and production cannot increase further until the bottleneck is addressed. Because material bottlenecks depend on companies upstream, the ramp-up time requires every company within the supply chain to ramp up (from upstream to downstream). Within the wargame, this resulted in the C&T IB being unable to meet the new DLA demand for multiple turns during contingency operations. Furthermore, DLA’s stockpiles were unable to fully mitigate the wargame demand. This would have resulted in military personnel lacking uniforms and the corresponding environmental or physical protection.
• In large-scale contingencies, everything becomes a bottleneck, and there is no “cure-all.” The large-scale contingency operation explored within the wargame presented players with demands five to seven times greater than current-day orders. Industry representatives indicated that their supply chains are lean, implying that companies need to increase equipment, staff, and material orders. Within the wargame, industry players repeatedly stressed that solutions that helped one company type often did not make sense for another. Policies supporting the IB must align with specific company needs.
• Delays between policy or planning and their implementation risk miscalculations. In the wargame, government players stockpiled component parts to mitigate delinquencies. However, when the wargame pivoted from a cold- to hot-weather contingency, some of DLA’s stockpile of cold-weather components went unused. Meanwhile, stockpiled parts that could be used across multiple uniform types could pivot to alternate products. This highlights the value of commonality in uniforms.
• Downstream C&T supply chain vendors face a “tragedy of the commons” with their upstream providers in a large-scale contingency. Producers upstream in the supply chain tended to be versatile (i.e., able to pivot materials to many different products). When DLA demand for all products ramped up simultaneously, companies upstream were overwhelmed with orders and had to make (often uninformed) choices about how to prioritize downstream companies. Upstream companies have little visibility on the operational importance of their products or the capacity of companies downstream. In the game, this resulted with some companies starved of materials while others held excess.
• Companies balance profit against labor stability. Labor stability is crucial to the C&T IB, particularly for Tier 1 for-profit vendors. Volatility in labor is a cost to companies as they hire and train new staff. Industry players balanced hiring decisions against the possibility of future layoffs and did not “chase” DLA demand. Instead, the industry ramped up to meet an average throughput to match DLA’s new order rate. This stopped cumulative delinquencies from increasing; however, cumulative delinquencies did not decrease until after the contingency ended. Post-conflict, players observed that the cumulative delinquencies could provide the C&T industry with a natural “soft landing” and mitigate layoffs associated with sharp drawdowns.