The Box - Marc Levinson [101]
Just like commercial shippers, military shippers needed to learn how to use the container to best advantage. At first, they treated it simply like a big, empty box. Much of the initial load on Sea-Land’s Okinawa service consisted of the smaller steel Conex containers. Four Conex boxes were loaded into each 35-foot Sea-Land container, meaning that a quarter of the weight inside the big container was nothing more than the steel of the smaller boxes. Logistics officers were uncertain how to make efficient use of the 45,000-pound load limit of an unrefrigerated container while utilizing all of its 2,088 cubic feet, so containers were frequently shipped underweight or with only half of their volume utilized. On the runs to Okinawa and to Subic Bay in the Philippines, for which the government had guaranteed a minimum number of containers, “It has become common practice … to take cargo that should go break-bulk and stuff it into Sea-Land’s containers to fulfill the guaranteed minimums,” an MSTS administrator complained. Military record keeping often was inadequate to take advantage of the container’s efficiencies: in early 1968, after MSTS started shipping from California to Hawaii in Matson’s containers, it found repeatedly that the containers listed on ships’ cargo manifests were not necessarily the ones arriving in Honolulu.21
Such adjustments notwithstanding, in 1968, the first full year of container operations, one-fifth of all military cargo in the Pacific was shipped in containers. The containerized share of nonpetroleum cargo was probably closer to two-fifths. On-time performance was spotty—the shipboard cranes on the vessels serving Da Nang were continual problems, and repair often required delaying the ship—but Sea-Land managed to deliver between 1,230 and 1,320 containers to Cam Ranh Bay every month in its first year of operation. By June 1968, the army’s supply operation in Da Nang was asking the MSTS for more container capacity. In October, Sea-Land added a fourth large C-4 containership to its Vietnam fleet and expanded its delivery area to fourteen interior locations. With other ship lines clamoring to enter the market, the Joint Chiefs sought to double container service to Vietnam at the end of 1968, only to run up against the fact that Sea-Land controlled the only deepwater container piers on the coast. Sea-Land itself offered to revise its contract and increase service. “Potential for multi million dollar cost reduction … is visualized,” reported the army’s assistant chief of staff for logistics.22 Indeed, evidence of lower costs and reduced damage was already mounting impressively. McLean estimated in 1967 that loading a containership, sailing it to Vietnam, and unloading it there cost about half as much per ton as carrying the same cargo in a navy-owned merchant ship, not counting the reduction in loss and damage. Looking back from 1970, Besson calculated that the armed forces could have saved $882 million in shipping, inventory, port, and storage costs between 1965 and 1968 if they had adopted containerization when the buildup began.23
The military, hesitant to adopt container technology, now became its greatest advocate, and containerization became a tool for reform. MSTS chief Ramage warned in October 1968 that the potential of the container system could not be fully realized until supply agencies and military traffic managers revamped their procedures. The army instructed its depots to stop combining shipments that would need to be sorted in Vietnam and to abide by the Three Cs: one container, one customer, one commodity. In 1968, McNamara named Besson, containerization’s most ardent military supporter, to head the Joint Logistics Review Board that would evaluate supply-system performance in Vietnam. Besson, with the support of McNamara’s successor, Melvin Laird, used the opportunity to push for a more centralized system of military logistics, run by the army