Winds of Change points to a Defense Industry Daily article on the growing trend of using militerized containers for everything from personnel transport to distributed power generation. The individual ideas are fascinating (especially the idea of a modular truck able to quickly swap out specialized containers, enabling it to go from cargo hauler to APC or ambulance as the mission requires), but I’m really intrigued by this example of the power of standards.

Joe Katzman points out that:

Containers are everywhere, produced in staggering numbers and carried around the world on a wide array of compatible ships, trains, planes, aircraft, et. al. As a potential military resource - and a civilian disaster-response option, too - they strike me as wildly under-utilized. Why not adapt them for use as ready-to-travel hardened military housing, with the ability to train as you fight, pack yourself up and ship immediately, then move them in-country and quickly set them up…

As Marc Levinson explores in The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, containerized shipping has played a huge role in lowering the overhead cost of shipping, a key catalyst for our current era of globalization. Containers aren’t sexy; Levinson acknowledges that “the standard container has all the romance of a tin can.” Their power comes from their standards: uniform size, handling techniques and security procedures. Unloading ships used to be a time consuming activity that took scores of longshoremen. Consequently, pre-container shipping in medium-sized ships cost ~$5.83/ton in 1956. With containers, specialized cranes can unload more cargo in less time, all while keeping goods secured from the epidemic of in-transit-theft during the pre-container era. This results in rates of ~$0.16/ton for the newest container ships.

Container shipping is nothing new to the military; the US military was using it more than thirty years ago during the Vietnam War. What excites me about this application, though, is how it leverages the power of the civilian container shipping infrastructure. It opens the possibility of using non-military assets for logistics, an especially important consideration in the case of disaster response and stabilization operations (aka SysAdmin missions). Surge capacity would be dramatically increased if super container ships could be called upon to transport mobile, renwable power stations and field hospitals to a disaster area or nation-building/peacekeeping operation.

The power of standards means that were this to really catch on, NGOs could invest in their own containers - be they for medical aid, power generation, food preparation (think of a Red Cross meal truck on steriods) - safe in the knowledge that their resources could be easily dropped into a ship, loaded onto a ruggadized or armored truck (depended upon the threat environment) and delivered to the needed area. Commercial practices for tracking containers could be leveraged for the essential logistical integration of these disparate resources.

As a side note, the investment in such areas by European companies like EADS, as well as the German and Danish militaries, reminded me of a point Dr. Barnett made back in PNM: Europe might not have much to offer the Levianthan force, but they are investing in SysAdmin capabilities.

Exciting stuff. Imagine being able to draw upon these sorts of resources in a post-hurricane/tsunami scenario. Or having been able to flood Iraqi cities with power generators and medical support in April and May of 2003, in order to demonstrate a real shift quickly (long before long lead-time infrastructure rebuilding could show results). It ain’t sexy like a fighter plane or a submarine, it’s about saving lives and dealing with the messy situations that heavy armor units and precision bombers aren’t built to address.