Humanitarian Logistics: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing for and Responding to Disasters (review)

Everyone is regularly bombarded with an increasing volume of news items reporting such major natural disasters as tsunamis, major flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and volcanic activities scattered across the globe. These natural disasters affect developing and developed nations alike without apparent discrimination. Moreover, manmade disasters that include displaced populations from acts of war and civil unrest, as well as large-scale industrial accidents, further add to the totals of threatened and suffering populations. No matter what their causes, their wakes are strewn with death, destruction, disease, hunger, homelessness, and economic hardship. The responses to human suffering typically come from government, nongovernment organizations (NGO), and the private sector with resources in the form of materiel, personnel, utilities, and transport capacity. Time is always a top priority with the key challenge being to properly prioritize the delivery of critical goods and services using available transport. Often, however, transport capacity is constrained not only by the number of ships, aircraft, and trucks, but also by its requisite infrastructure that more often than not has been destroyed.

Christopher and Tatham open this volume of collected essays with an articulate preface that collectively compares and contrasts commercial and humanitarian logistics. Further, they frame humanitarian logistics by offering an understanding of issues associated with the fact that (1) coordinating the operations of a large number of unrelated organizations is challenging because they often operate with different missions and objectives; (2) humanitarian relief poses requirements for types of materiel and services that vary from disaster to disaster; (3) the human resources available often are volunteers with little to no training; (4) the scopes of individual disasters are different; (5) the operating environments are seldom the same; and (6) the respective politics may require compromises.

The themes of the various chapters appear to be laid out in a logical sequence. The book commences with a general definition of what humanitarian logistics is and ends with three chapters on relationships, two of which focus on those between humanitarian-related agencies and military organizations. The inability to effectively coordinate the efforts of myriad organizations has hampered more than helped many relief efforts, thus it seems fitting that the final chapter endeavors to address relationship-building in the supply chain. That the final chapter suggests that humanitarian logistics is clearly becoming much more strategic also underscores the importance of the information flows that need to occur during the pre-incident, incident, and post-incident phases across the various supply chains.

The two penultimate chapters on military logistics emphasize the similarities—and indeed there are more similarities than differences— between military operations and their humanitarian counterpart. While the authors point out that not every military organization has the requisite doctrine, training, and culture to effectively carry out humanitarian relief operations, many do and in recent decades have been so deployed in places such as Indonesia, Kosovo, Pakistan, and the United States. Military and humanitarian logistics operations alike require a command system to coordinate large-scale operations, transportation capabilities, and security for the distribution system. Both also require an inherent flexibility to deal with a range of situations, both from scale and nature of incident standpoints. There is, however, another common thread, which is the meshing of the commercial supply chains with the humanitarian and military equivalents. Ultimately, it is the commercial supply chains that link inventories of critical supplies with the means of delivery to the affected areas and many times may fill the end-to-end supply chain management, as witnessed in Wal-Mart's capabilities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Perhaps the key point that Christopher and Tatham address is the need for increased professionalism, specifically the capabilities of the people employed, the assets controlled, the information managed, and the metrics required. Clearly, there are some world-scale organizations such as the Red Cross/Red Crescent, United Nations' World Food Program, the Fritz Institute...