Militaries have always struggled to balance the “tooth-to-tail” structure of their forces. For every bullet fired on the front line—the “teeth” of the force—there is a long “tail” of procurement and shipping that gets that bullet where it needs to be on time. If military logistics fail, the force will suffer or even face defeat. As with other areas of defense, artificial intelligence and other technological advances hold the promise of improving military logistics. Making it work is not a simple proposition, however. To gain insight into the challenges and nuances that lead to success, I spoke with David Tuttle, a former Army officer and CEO of Rune Technologies, whose TyrOS platform is designed to support logistics in contested environments.
Understanding the role of logistics in military operations
Effective logistics determines the outcome of most military operations. According to Tuttle, “Transporting supplies, personnel, and equipment into contested environments where communication may be denied or degraded is the task of military logisticians. While in combat, logisticians must be able to answer basic questions, including: What supplies are available? Where are they located? What units need them, and when do they need them? How can they be transported to where they’re needed?”
While logistics underpins every step of military operations, today’s military logistics systems rely on whiteboards, Excel spreadsheets, and legacy manual processes that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades. This is not an optimal situation, especially as the US military is engaged in an increasingly fragmented and complex portfolio of operations around the world.
As Tuttle put it, “Military logisticians spend a significant amount of time managing inventories, creating logistics status reports (LOGSTATs), manually entering data into systems, and physically coordinating the movement of supplies and equipment. They often struggle with aggregating information across units and frequently resort to phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings to synchronize logistics operations.”
How the Ukraine war has affected thinking about logistics
When Tuttle observes the ongoing war in Ukraine, he sees the impact of failures in military logistics. He shared, “The war revealed critical logistics vulnerabilities, showing how supply chain failures can stop military operations—such as when Russian forces failed to capture Kyiv partly due to their inability to resupply frontline units effectively.”
Additionally, he remarked on Ukraine’s “spiderweb drone attack,” which highlighted that logistics in the rear, even for global superpowers, can be highly vulnerable. He said, “Finding ways to dynamically reroute supplies to these newly identified threat zones and exclusion areas within one’s own logistical sustainment area at machine speed will be essential for any superpower aiming to maintain a large army in the field.”
The realities of cloud computing for military logistics
When it comes to operational military logistics, cloud computing is not particularly helpful because logisticians often operate in environments where they cannot connect to the cloud. Rune went a different way. According to Tuttle, “Instead of building better cloud computing, we abandoned cloud-reliant thinking entirely for battlefield logistics. Our edge-first architecture embeds intelligence directly where decisions get made.” The cloud also presents some serious security risks, as exemplified by recent revelations have shown that Chinese nationals were working on cloud systems set up for the Pentagon.
With this architecture, systems function independently when networks fail, synchronizing only when communications allow. Per Tuttle, “The approach mirrors how military units actually operate. Combat units don’t wait for division headquarters to respond to enemy contact. They assess situations using local information, make decisions, and report results when possible. We built logistics systems that function the same way.”
The impact of AI on military logistics
Tuttle said, “AI allows us to not only track supplies and inventory in real time, but it also allows us to predict how those levels will change given dozens or hundreds of different factors, so that supplies can be automatically allocated and routed or rerouted where they need to go. While a human will always be the final decision-maker, AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for predicting when vehicles will need more fuel, troops will run out of ammunition, or autonomous drones will need to be repaired – at speeds not possible by humans.”
Weighing risk and potential with technology in military operations
Technological integration and logistics tracking are not new to the U.S. military, with existing predictive analytics for maintaining aircraft, submarines, and other vessels. However, current platforms that display parts failures and maintenance hours to logisticians lack continuity. Tuttle commented, “What’s needed is technology designed for active, contested environments that functions as an orchestration layer between predictive analytics and supply chain management.”
He went on to say, “Our fundamental approach is not to add complexity where it doesn’t need to exist. That’s why we built TyrOS to solve actual problems that warfighters face, rather than create a fancy tool that no one on the ground will use. We fundamentally believe software should be intuitive, easy to learn and use, and lower the cognitive load for our logistician customers so they can apply their immense knowledge and skills to the art of logistical planning and execution, not the science of number crunching and optimization.”
The Rune TyrOS solution
Rune’s TyrOS platform operates through a modular, distributed architecture specifically designed for contested environments. At its core, TyrOS captures data across the pillars of military logistics: inventory, personnel, equipment, and distribution.
Tuttle said, “When deployed on tactical edge devices, TyrOS operates through a sophisticated mesh networking capability that enables units to function independently when disconnected and synchronize when connectivity is restored. This is achieved through an ‘offline-first’ architecture that caches critical information locally, while prioritizing data transmission during brief connectivity windows.”
Photo by Get Lost Mike: https://www.pexels.com/photo/military-camp-6256808/