Shattering The Strike: Reimagining Prepositioned Sustainment For High-Intensity Conflict

Traditional military prepositioning relies on large, fixed depots or contracted sealift ships; these concentrate valuable materiel into a small number of targets vulnerable to precision strikes in a Western Pacific conflict. This paper argues that surviving high-intensity conflict requires shifting prepositioned sustainment from physical hardening toward economic denial. Suppose a distributed architecture, designated as the Agile Maritime Array (AMA), that embeds military containers within the vast excess capacity of commercial shipping already transiting regional trade lanes, supplemented by dispersed hardened land nodes. The system derives survivability from three properties: dispersion reduces the payoff of striking any single node, movement complicates targeting, and commingling with commercial freight creates ambiguity between military and civilian cargo. Using a kinetic model of missile penetration, hit, and lethality probabilities alongside a game-theoretic targeting analysis, we show that equalising the missile cost per TEU across storage venues forces an adversary to expend disproportionate munitions for modest attrition. Findings indicate that dispersion, mobility, and cost imposition together outperform concentration or hardening alone in sustaining forces during the opening weeks of conflict.