A military officer who specializes in mission planning, transportation, or maintenance of army troops is known as an army logistician. An army logistician’s main concerns include calculating supply needs and methods, determining what facilities are needed and how to build them, and ensuring that necessary equipment is properly distributed to troops. To better distribute trained officers across the wide range of responsibilities common to logistics, each national military tends to group its logistics officers in different ways.
A person must go through extensive training to become an army logistician. Both soldiers and officers have a lot of career options in the logistics branches of militaries. Soldiers can be trained in a variety of trades required to carry out logistics missions, such as movement controllers, drivers, dispatchers, couriers, and even chefs in the British Army.
Officer training prepares soldiers to lead troops as troop commanders who can plan and manage logistics operations from the base or on the battlefield. Officers, like troopers, can specialize in a variety of fields, such as food supply or port maintenance. Because many aspects of logistics planning overlap, officers can sometimes specialize in multiple disciplines.
Most armies require logisticians to ensure the smooth operation of military operations such as training, peacekeeping, and wartime missions. While it is critical to have a plan in place for capturing an enemy outpost, it is also critical to know how much food the troops will require, what medical facilities will be required, and how to protect supply lines so that necessary equipment and supplies reach the troops. These are just a few of the major concerns that an army logistician must deal with on a daily basis.
An army logistician can serve in a variety of roles within the army. Some logisticians accompany troops to oversee logistics operations such as assembling supply trains, supervising the construction of facilities, and managing supplies in the field. Others may work as strategic planners from bases, assisting in the development of field operations. A military logistician can also be a teacher, instructing new logistics recruits in their chosen fields.
Individual armies may divide logistics responsibilities into a variety of categories. Quartermaster, Ordinance, Transportation, and a multi-discipline branch simply called Logistics are the four main branches of logistics in the United States army. An army logistician in the Australian army can work in one of six branches, including Catering, Engineering, Medical, and Transport.