The 2026 U.S. experience in the Middle East reinforces a core doctrinal truth: logistics failure rarely manifests as sudden collapse. It emerges as friction across a system of systems.

NZDF doctrine defines logistics as the science of planning and executing the movement and sustainment of forces, encompassing supply, transport, maintenance, infrastructure, and services. More importantly, it frames logistics as a network of interdependent nodes and flows operating across strategic, operational, and tactical levels. These systems do not operate themselves. Their effectiveness depends on the people who plan, manage, adapt, and recover them under pressure.

The 2026 U.S. experience illustrates how sustainment failure actually appears. It does not begin with a dramatic ammunition blackout. It appears first as friction: delayed replenishment, reduced menus, suspended mail, and the quiet disappearance of “minor” items such as toiletries, clothing, and batteries.

Reporting in April 2026, drawing on service members’ accounts and imagery from deployed vessels such as USS Tripoli and USS Abraham Lincoln, described reduced food availability and the suspension of military mail services. Official responses rejected claims of outright shortages, but conceded a more important point: replenishment can be delayed by operations, weather, and access constraints, and consumption must then adjust accordingly.

This pattern was anticipated decades earlier. A 1994 Naval War College study identified U.S. logistics as a centre of gravity and outlined how attacks on ports, airfields, and pre-positioned depots could degrade operations without destroying the system.[1] More recent reporting confirms that key nodes such as Bahrain and Jebel Ali remain central to sustainment architecture.[2]

In 2026, Iranian strikes appear to have validated that model. Rather than destroying logistics outright, they disrupted and displaced it, translating operational pressure into day-to-day scarcity at the user end, precisely where morale and endurance reside.

The critical point is not collapse. It is adaptation under pressure. Friction is absorbed by people, planners, maintainers, and operators who compensate for delay, scarcity, and uncertainty.

Maritime Nations and the Wider Logistics Shock

The conflict also demonstrates that military logistics cannot be separated from the commercial systems that sustain it. Disruption in the Gulf affected shipping routes, fuel distribution, insurance costs, and port access.

For a maritime nation such as New Zealand, this has direct implications. Deployed forces rely on:

• commercial shipping networks
• fuel supply chains
• host-nation infrastructure
• coalition logistics hubs

The vulnerability sits not just within the force, but across the system sustaining it and four structural realities emerge:

First, geography is no longer protection.
Long-range strike and persistent ISR mean rear areas are targetable. Distance now creates fragility, not safety.

Second, forward deployments become liabilities.
Small, externally sustained forces are vulnerable not at the point of contact, but along the chain that supports them.

Third, maritime dependence amplifies risk.
Sea-based sustainment creates predictability, concentration, and exposure through dual-use infrastructure.

Fourth, host-nation dependence becomes critical.
Allied and commercial nodes do not need to be destroyed, only disrupted.

The problem therefore shifts. The question is no longer whether a force can deploy, but whether it can sustain operations under continuous pressure.

For New Zealand, endurance will fail before combat capability. The decisive factor becomes recovery and adaptation, not initial resilience.

The Historical Pattern: Forward Logistics

This is not new. New Zealand’s wartime logisticians understood it clearly. In the First World War, the New Zealand Ordnance Depot at Farringdon Road supported national requirements within the British system. In the Second World War, this expanded into a distributed network across Egypt, Italy, and the Pacific.

These systems were not just stockpiles. They were forward, semi-autonomous sustainment networks combining:

• inventory depth
• distribution capability
• repair and maintenance
• trained personnel

Each layer of autonomy required more people and more stock. That was the trade-off: resilience through forward capacity.

This pattern continued post-war through Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, and East Timor. Even within coalition systems, New Zealand maintained identifiable national logistics elements.

The conclusion was consistent: forward operations required forward sustainment.

The Contemporary Posture

Open-source evidence suggests a different balance today. The 2010 civilianisation programme shifted approximately 1,400 military roles, including logistics functions, into civilian positions. Procurement data shows heavy reliance on Defence Commercial Services, while major functions such as warehousing, maintenance, and catering are now intertwined with commercial providers.

This reflects a broader Western trend: efficiency in peacetime through outsourcing and centralisation. The issue is not efficiency itself. It is resilience under disruption.

Recent reporting indicates some rebalancing, including increased inventory holdings following global supply shocks. However, public data does not demonstrate the existence of deep, deployable reserve stocks on the historical model.

The key question is therefore practical, if commercial systems are disrupted, does the Army retain the uniformed depth and organisational capacity to assume and sustain those functions? 

The 2026 American warning

The most useful way to read the 2026 U.S. reporting is not as a morality tale about poor catering, but as a case study in how contested logistics become visible to ordinary service members. The Independent reported that U.S. personnel in the Middle East were facing food shortages, that families were sending care packages containing food and other essentials, and that a suspended military mail service was delaying those packages. The article also noted that more than 50,000 U.S. service members were in the region and that some vessels had not made port since the war began.[3] NDTV’s account, likewise drawing on the same underlying reporting, highlighted nearly empty trays, complaints about the absence of fresh produce, and reliance on families for supplements.[4] Official United States Postal Service (USPS) alerts independently confirmed that, effective 7 April 2026, service to multiple military post office ZIP codes had been temporarily suspended; by late April, USPS still listed 26 military ZIP codes as suspended. That is a logistics fact, not a rumour.[5]

The U.S. Navy’s rebuttal matters too, because it clarifies the mechanism. Adm. Daryl Caudle said deployed ships had at least ten days of food, and most had more than thirty days, while the U.S. Navy and the Secretary of Defence rejected the “food shortage” framing. Yet Stars and Stripes and Navy Times both reported something equally important: culinary specialists acknowledged that orders can be pushed right when operations intervene, that replenishment can arrive weeks late, and that menus are modified until new deliveries come in. In other words, the official rebuttal did not eliminate sustainment friction; it narrowed the claim from “starvation” to “delay and adaptation.” That distinction is analytically crucial. In war, the logistics system need not implode to matter. It merely has to be hard enough to impose scarcity, uncertainty, and degraded morale.[6]

This was exactly the logic of Peter Scala’s Naval War College paper, U.S. Logistics Vulnerability: Major Regional Conflict with Iran. Scala argued that U.S. “logistics might” was one of America’s centres of gravity and built a scenario in which attacks on airfields, ports, and pre-positioned assets in Bahrain and Kuwait would distract, delay, and degrade U.S. operations.[7] The paper’s specifics belong to the early 1990s. Still, its core proposition has aged well: when long-distance power projection depends on predictable flows through a small number of hubs, the theatre logistic network itself becomes a prime target. Official Military Sealift Command reporting from 2025 reinforces this point by showing that combat logistics force vessels were loading ammunition in Bahrain, providing fuel support in the Gulf, and using Jebel Ali for readiness and repair tasks. That is the architecture an adversary studies.[8]

Joint doctrine states the broader principle in a less dramatic but equally important way. The Joint Staff still describes logistics as the keystone of joint logistics, while Army sustainment doctrine defines the sustainment warfighting function as enabling freedom of action, extending operational reach, and prolonging endurance.[9] The 2026 episode is therefore not a contradiction of doctrine. It is doctrine made concrete. Beans, mail, hygiene items, spare clothing, and batteries are not peripheral to combat endurance; they are its daily expression. 

Why New Zealand’s wartime logisticians built forward

New Zealand’s historical practice began from a hard truth: coalition integration did not remove national requirements. In the First World War, the NZEF could fit into the British imperial system, but the need for New Zealand-specific items was still recognised. That drove the establishment of the New Zealand Ordnance Depot at 30–32 Farringdon Road in London in late 1916, close to headquarters and rail access, so that NZ camps, hospitals, and establishments in Britain could be supported through a national node.[10] This was not a sign of mistrust in allies. It was an acknowledgement that national issue scales, accounting, clothing, and special stores always leave residual sovereign demand. 

The same logic expanded in the Second World War. The 2nd NZEF Base Ordnance Depot in Egypt, later split between base and advance functions into Italy, was the primary ordnance organisation sustaining New Zealand forces from 1940 to 1946.[11] In the Pacific,  NZAOC material shows a parallel depot logic: a Base Ordnance Depot in New Caledonia, an Advanced Ordnance Depot in Guadalcanal, and a forward depot at Vella Lavella. The 1943–44 reports are striking because they discuss not just locations, but the economics of depth. Each new sub-depot required more personnel and larger store holdings to create working margins. That is the classical logistics trade-off: autonomy buys resilience, but only by carrying inventory and people forward.[12] Crucially, these systems required not just stockholding, but trained personnel at scale, able to manage inventory, control distribution, conduct repairs, and adapt to disruption close to the point of use.

These systems were multi-corps mechanisms, not just warehouses. Historically, the service corps carried rations, POL, and movements; ordnance controlled stocks, accounting, and issue of clothing and camp equipment, and much of the materiel system; engineers provided electrical and mechanical support, repairing and recovering vehicles and equipment. Later examples make those roles explicit. The ANZUK Supply Platoon, for instance, existed to provide foodstuffs and POL to the force.[13] While NZDF’s own combat service support output descriptions continued to separate transport, supply, maintenance support, and movements as distinct support functions.

The post-1945 record matters because it shows that New Zealand did not abandon forward logistics once mass armies disappeared. In occupied Japan, New Zealand’s 4 Forward Ordnance Depot, later 4 New Zealand Advanced Ordnance Depot at Chofu, sat inside a broader British Commonwealth Occupation Force structure that also had a multinational base ordnance depot at Kure. This was an integrated Commonwealth system, but it still included dedicated New Zealand ordnance elements. In Vietnam, New Zealand’s Logistic Support Element was embedded in the 1st Australian Logistic Support Group at Vung Tau from 1966; this was not full sovereign support, but it was still a recognised national logistic framework inside an allied base.

The more important shift came with the impending British withdrawal east of Suez. In 1970, New Zealand joined Australia in establishing 5 Advanced Ordnance Depots in Singapore. In 1971. That became the tri-national ANZUK Ordnance Depot, which by 1972 held roughly 45,000 line items. When ANZUK ended, New Zealand converted its share into the New Zealand Advanced Ordnance Depot, which remained in Singapore until 1989. In parallel, supply functions continued through an ANZUK Supply Platoon and then a New Zealand supply depot. This is the clearest postwar evidence that New Zealand’s logisticians concluded that a persistent forward presence required a real forward sustainment system, not merely rear-area faith in allied benevolence.

East Timor confirmed the enduring pattern. New Zealand’s initial deployment flowed through Darwin, with RNZAF Hercules flights shuttling personnel and stores between Darwin, Dili, and the NZ battalion operating base at Suai. The architecture was smaller than Singapore’s depot-era footprint. Still, the operational logic was the same: forward support, intermediate mounting, and theatre sustainment cannot be improvised from home stations alone.

Location	Period	Function	Stockholding depth	Autonomy
London, Farringdon Road	1916–1919	UK depot for NZEF camps, hospitals, and NZ-specific items	Moderate	Moderate
Egypt and Italy	1940–1946	Base and advance ordnance depots for 2nd NZEF	Deep	High
Fiji	1940–1942	Early Pacific base support and island defense sustainment	Moderate	Moderate
Bourail / Nouméa, New Caledonia	1943–1944	Base ordnance depot for 3 NZ Division in Pacific	Deep	High
Guadalcanal / Vella Lavella	1943–1944	Advanced and forward depots close to operations	Limited-to-moderate	Moderate
Chofu / Kure, Japan	1946–1948	NZ forward/advanced ordnance within Commonwealth occupation system	Moderate	Moderate
Vung Tau / Nui Dat	1965–1971	Embedded NZ logistic support within Australian system	Limited	Low-to-moderate
Singapore	1970–1989	5 AOD, ANZUK OD, then NZAOD and NZ supply depot for FPDA-era force	Deep	High
Darwin / Dili / Suai	1999–2002	Mounting, airbridge, fuel and theater sustainment for East Timor	Moderate	Moderate
Current NZDF expeditionary model	2010s–2020s	Mix of organic CSS, civilian staff, contractor support, and allied integration	Publicly unspecified	Publicly unspecified

The table’s qualifiers are necessarily qualitative, because public New Zealand data do not disclose deployable stock levels or theatre reserve holdings. But the structural contrast is unmistakable: historical New Zealand practice repeatedly created forward depots with identifiable stocks and geography; the contemporary public record describes systems, contracts, facilities, and processes far more than it describes forward-positioned reserve depth.

The present New Zealand posture

The strongest open-source evidence for a thinner uniformed support base is the 2010 civilianisation program. The Office of the Auditor-General reported that NZDF committed to converting 1,400 military positions in the “middle” and “back” into civilian positions, explicitly including logistics and training. The stated aim was to move more military people to the deployable “front.” The Auditor-General also concluded that the project contributed to reduced capability and that NZDF then had to recover from the damage.[14] That does not prove the disappearance of second-line logistics. It does prove that, in the name of efficiency and force rebalancing, New Zealand deliberately reduced the military share of its support structure. 

Public procurement evidence points in the same direction. A Defence industry study noted that Defence Logistics Command managed roughly 85 percent of NZDF procurement and that around 60 percent of that was handled through Defence Commercial Services.[15] More recently, the Ministry of Defence publicly credited a 2022 review of Army logistics arrangements for warehousing, maintenance, repair, and overhaul—Project Alexander—as having been conducted collaboratively with the incumbent supplier, Lockheed Martin NZ, and Logistics Command Land.[16]  In other words, major elements of what earlier generations would have recognised as core second- and third-line military functions are now visibly entangled with commercial machinery, market contracts, and prime-contractor relationships. 

Current tendering reinforces the picture. NZDF’s 2025 “Future Hospitality Services” sought a strategic long-term catering and hospitality supplier. Its facilities-maintenance program sought outsourced prime FMS providers across nine camps and bases. Earlier tenders covered rations, industrial and engineering consumables, land transportation services, and other support categories through Defence Commercial Services and syndicated contracts.[17] None of this is unusual by contemporary Western standards. Indeed, it is precisely what many militaries did after the Cold War: capture the peace dividend by shifting routine support into civilian employment and commercial service markets. The problem is not peacetime efficiency. The problem is that efficiency-optimised support chains are often brittle under interruption, scarce lift, airspace closure, and hostile action.

The public record also shows why caution is necessary. NZDF’s 2024 annual report stated that inventories were above budget by NZ$26.6 million because global disruption led the force to hold more inventory as a buffer against uncertainty. That suggests some institutional re-learning after recent supply shocks. The same report also records completion of the Linton Maintenance Support Facility and ongoing work to modernise logistics information systems and clothing/personal-equipment systems.[18] So the fairest judgment is not that New Zealand has embraced a blind “just in time” ideology and owns no buffers. It is that open sources show a logistics system increasingly managed through commercial interfaces and civilianised structures, while offering too little public evidence to prove theatre-depth reserve stocks on the historical model. This raises a practical question. If commercial systems are disrupted and supply chains become contested, to what extent does the Army retain the uniformed personnel, experience, and organisational depth required to assume, manage, and sustain those functions at scale?

Consumables decide endurance

This matters across all classes of supply, but especially for high-turnover consumables. Historically, New Zealand learned the lesson through clothing and boots. A history of postwar combat boots records that wartime stocks delayed change at first, but by the mid-1950s leather-soled boots were proving inadequate in the Malayan jungle, which pushed the Army into research and trials with scientific and industrial partners.[19] The combat-clothing history makes the same point from another angle: older stocks could be mixed with newer garments for a while, but climate, terrain, and theatre requirements steadily forced change.[20] Clothing and footwear are therefore not cosmetic. In wet, abrasive, and tropical environments, they become wear items with replacement rates that differ markedly from those observed in temperate New Zealand conditions.

The modern equivalent is battery demand. U.S. Army reporting has repeatedly described soldiers carrying heavy battery loads for radios, GPS, night-vision devices, optics, and other worn systems; one official article described a 72-hour mission requiring seven battery types weighing 7.3 kg, while another cited a typical figure of more than 9.1 kg. More recent Army reporting indicates that energy demand continues to rise as high-tech soldier systems proliferate.[21] Batteries now sit where boot polish, webbing, Blanco, and extra socks once seemed mundane: they are daily-use items that decide whether a force can communicate, see at night, navigate, and operate sensors and drones. In any contested theatre, batteries become both a tactical enabler and a logistical burden.

The 2026 U.S. reporting underlines the linkage. Even if the Navy’s rebuttal is accepted at face value, family efforts to send food, socks, and similar comfort-or-necessity items tell the same story as New Zealand’s boot trials in Malaya: the “small” high-use things are often the first to become visible when a sustainment system is under strain. Managing these shortfalls is not purely a supply problem. It requires personnel capable of forecasting demand, reallocating scarce resources, and sustaining distribution under pressure.

Policy implications

The historical and contemporary evidence lead to a practical, not nostalgic, conclusion. New Zealand does not need to recreate a 1943 empire of depots. But it does need to ensure that both the systems and the personnel are in place to sustain operations when those systems are under stress.

• First, it should identify a short list of mission-critical consumables for protected stockholding: clothing, boots, batteries, medical supplies, water-production consumables, and selected vehicle spares. The point is not to stock everything deeply; it is to protect the items whose absence rapidly degrades endurance and morale.
• Second, it should rebuild the habit of forward positioning. Historically, that meant London, Maadi, Bourail, Guadalcanal, Singapore, or Darwin. In contemporary terms, it means access arrangements, pre-packed theatre sets, scalable forward storage in allied locations, and clear trigger points for activating them.
• Third, commercial dependence should be made surge-capable rather than merely efficient. Rations, transport, facilities support, freight forwarding, and contractor maintenance can remain contracted, but contracts should include war clauses, regional alternates, rapid lift options, and standards for operating under degraded communications and closed airspace.
• Fourth, organic maintenance and movements capacity should be protected as insurance, not treated as inefficiency. New Zealand’s historical advantage lay not only in holding stock, but in combining stock, movement, recovery, and repair close enough to the user to matter. A contracted peacetime base workshop is not the same thing as deployable maintenance depth.
• Fifth, personnel depth itself should be treated as a capability. This does not necessarily mean large standing increases in force size, but it does require sufficient trained logisticians, across supply, transport, maintenance, and movements, who can expand, assume additional roles, and operate independently when systems degrade. The ability to absorb disruption is not a system property alone; it is a function of people.

Finally, allied integration should be pursued as a force multiplier, but never as a substitute for knowing one’s own requirements. New Zealand’s own history repeatedly shows the pattern: integrated systems in Britain, the Commonwealth occupation in Japan, the Australian base in Vietnam, and ANZUK in Singapore all still required national sub-systems or national accounting. Coalition logistics work best when each partner contributes coherent national support into the larger framework, not when a smaller force simply assumes that someone else will notice and solve its shortages.

Across all of these measures, the common requirement is not simply capability, but capacity, enough trained people to absorb disruption, adapt systems, and keep sustainment functioning when conditions are no longer permissive.

Open questions and limitations

Open-source evidence does not reveal the present deployable stock depth, reserve holdings, or second-line readiness of the New Zealand Army in a way that would support a definitive public assessment. Likewise, historical linkages between specific operational shortfalls and later structural decisions remain, in some cases, inferential rather than conclusive. The 2026 U.S. reporting also remains contested in detail, even as it consistently points to the same underlying reality: sustainment systems under pressure degrade through delay, adaptation, and accumulated friction.

What is clearer is the broader pattern.

The operating environment is shifting toward one in which logistics systems will be contested, disrupted, and forced to adapt under pressure. In such conditions, resilience cannot be measured solely in terms of stockholding, infrastructure, or contractual arrangements. It depends equally on the depth of personnel available to manage, reconfigure, and sustain those systems as conditions deteriorate.

New Zealand’s own history reflects this understanding. From Farringdon Road in 1916, through the base and advanced depots of the Second World War, to Singapore and the forward sustainment arrangements in East Timor, New Zealand repeatedly built systems that combined stock, infrastructure, and sufficient trained personnel to operate them forward, often at distance, and often under pressure.

The contemporary system reflects a different balance, shaped by efficiency, integration, and commercial support.

The question is not whether that system works in permissive conditions. It demonstrably does.

The question is whether it retains sufficient depth, in both structure and people, to adapt and endure when those conditions no longer apply.

If the historical record offers any guidance, it is that resilience has never rested on systems alone. It has depended on the ability to carry capability forward, in stock, in structure, and in people, and to sustain it when conditions are at their most difficult.

Ultimately, resilience in logistics is not only a matter of what is held, or where it is held, but of who is available, and in sufficient depth, to make the system function when it comes under sustained pressure.

Notes

[1] Peter A Scala, “U.S. Logistics Vulnerability: Major Regional Conflict with Iran,” Naval War College no. (1994).

[2] sections on Fifth Fleet combat logistics force support, Bahrain loading, and Jebel Ali repair and readiness activity. Military Sealift Command, “2025 in Review,” USNI News, 16 April 2025, https://news.usni.org/2026/01/21/u-s-navys-military-sealift-command-2025-in-review.

[3] Brendan Rascius, “Morale Is Going to Be at an All-Time Low’: Iran War Troops Living on Meager Rations as Postal Service Stops Delivering,” The Independent, 17 April 2026, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/iran-war-soldiers-food-shortages-mail-b2959960.html.

[4] NDTV World Desk, “US Troops Given Small Food Portions, Nearly Empty Trays on Warships Deployed in Iran Conflict,” NDTV, April 2026, https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-iran-war-us-troops-given-small-food-portions-nearly-empty-trays-on-warships-deployed-in-iran-conflict-11369665.

[5] United States Postal Service, “Mail Service Alerts and Updates,”7 April 2026, https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/.

[6] Riley Ceder, “CNO Denies Reports of Poor Food Service Aboard Navy Vessels,” Navy Times, 20 April 2026; Alison Bath, “Navy Having No Problems Feeding Sailors in Middle East, Admiral Says in Denying Reports,” Stars and Stripes, 21April 2026.

[7] Peter A Scala, “U.S. Logistics Vulnerability: Major Regional Conflict with Iran.”

[8] Military Sealift Command, “2025 in Review.”

[9] United States Government Army, Joint Publication JP 4-0 Joint Logistics February 2019 (2019); U.S.G.U. Army, Field Manual FM 4-0 Sustainment Operations July 2019 (Independently Published, 2019).

[10] “New Zealand Ordnance Depot, Farringdon Road, London,” To the Warrior His Arms, History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps and it predecessors, 2021, accessed 1 March, 2026.

[11] “New Zealand Base Ordnance Depot, Egypt and Italy 1940–46,” To the Warrior His Arms, History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps and it predecessors, 2018, accessed 1 March, 2026.

[12] “Reports on NZ Ordnance Depots in the Pacific,,” To the Warrior His Arms, History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps and it predecessors, 2020, accessed 1 March, 2026; Oliver A. Gillespie, The tanks : an unofficial history of the activities of the Third New Zealand Division Tank Squadron in the Pacific (A.H. and A.W. Reed for the Third Division Histories Committee, 1947).

[13] “ANZUK Supply Platoon,” To the Warrior His Arms, History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps and it predecessors, 2017, accessed 20 March, 2026.

[14] New Zealand. Office of the Auditor-General, New Zealand Defence Force: The Civilianisation Project (Office of the Auditor-General, 2013). https://oag.parliament.nz/2013/civilianisation.

[15] New Zealand. Ministry of Defence and New Zealand. Ministry of Defence. Evaluation Division, Defence Industry: Optimising New Zealand Industry Involvement in the New Zealand Defence Sector (Ministry of Defence, 2014). https://www.defence.govt.nz/assets/publications/evaluation-report-10-2014-optimising-nz-industry-involvement-in-the-nz-defence-sector.pdf.

[16] New Zealand Defence Force New Zealand Ministry of Defence, 2022 Awards of Excellence to Industry (Ministry of Defence, 2022). https://www.defence.govt.nz/business-and-industry/industry-awards/2022-awards-of-excellence-to-industry/?stage=Live.

[17] New Zealand Government Electronic Tenders Service, NZDF Land Transportation Services, ( , 2022). ; New Zealand Government Electronic Tenders Service, Industrial and Engineering Consumables,” tender notice ( , 2015). ; New Zealand Government Electronic Tenders Service, Supply of Rations,” tender notice, ( , 2016). ; New Zealand Government Electronic Tenders Service, NZDF Future Hospitality Services,” advance notice for 2025 Request for Proposal ( , 2024). ; New Zealand Government Electronic Tenders Service, NZDF Future Facilities Maintenance,” tender notice ( , 2025). ; New Zealand Defence Force, Annual Report 2024 ( , 2024). .

[18] New Zealand Defence Force, Annual Report 2024.

[19] “New Zealand Army Combat Boots – 1945–1980,” To the Warrior His Arms, History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps and it predecessors, 2022, accessed 20 March, 2026.

[20] “Development of NZ Army Combat Clothing, 1955–1980,” To the Warrior His Arms, History of the Royal New Zealand Army Ordnance Corps and it predecessors, 2023, accessed 20 March, 2026.

[21] “Army R&D energizes battery charging for Soldiers,” U.S. Army, 2021, accessed 20 March, 2026, https://www.army.mil/article/251622/army_rd_energizes_battery_charging_for_soldiers; “Army partners with University of Maryland-led battery consortium,” U.S. Army, 2020, accessed 20 March, 2026, https://www.army.mil/article/240138/army_partners_with_university_of_maryland_led_battery_consortium; “CCDC’s Road Map to Modernizing the Army: Soldier lethality,” U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center, 2020, accessed 20 March, 2026, https://www.dvidshub.net/news/358111/ccdcs-road-map-modernizing-army-soldier-lethality.