The U.S. military, which spends more than $90 billion per year on logistics and resupply, is modernizing and outsourcing much of that work to save time and money—and raise its level of preparedness.

And Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, one of the military's principal contractors, is not only restructuring many of its own services but also building a whole new business to support that effort.

Joe Grosson, who serves as a kind of cross-divisional logistics evangelist and rainmaker at Lockheed Martin, has been working to consolidate the company's splintered systems maintenance businesses into a more efficient whole.

In the process, Grosson has discovered that logistics and sustainment not only could be incredibly lucrative for Lockheed Martin but also could give the Department of Defense lower costs and weapons systems that are more reliable on the battlefield.

"We recognized that the corporation was not organized to understand the size of the logistics base there was out there to get," said Grosson in Gaithersburg, Md.

The DOD's logistics modernization is the kind of top-down strategic restructuring of a supply chain that shows dramatic benefit from business-school process analyses but is rarely seen in the real world.

Unfortunately, the centralization of that effort is more a theory than a reality, and the benefits of outsourcing parts of DOD logistics and maintenance responsibilities are far from clear.

Despite campaigns by high-ranking DOD officials and military officers, the logistics restructuring is more an ad hoc process than a strategic one.

One big problem is that the military procurement, logistics and maintenance business is divided not only into components run by the Air Force, Army, Marines, Navy and Coast Guard but also by various commands within each service and by weapons systems within each command.

Despite the similarities between them, for example, even mundane and replicable parts for the Air Force's F-22 fighter plane and the multiservice F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—due to hit full production in September —were designed separately, and they will be supplied to the military under contracts that cover only each weapons system, with little regard for shared logistics or maintenance processes.

Since as early as 1996, DOD officials have been debating how to make the process more efficient.