4 ms·

Logistics pipelines are designed to efficiently flow in one direction only. At large scale if returns are handled at all, it has to be a separate system. In the

Logistics pipelines are designed to efficiently flow in one direction only. At large scale if returns are handled at all, it has to be a separate system. In the extreme case of logistic pipelines into war zones it leads to what looks like extreme waste. There was an infamous case during the Vietnam war when enterprising journalists exposed how expensive stuff, the really big item being F4 Phantom jet engines, that could not be used were being destroyed on site. Some politicians got to profess outrage at the Pentagon's wastefulness and get air time on the evening news. I believe there were even congressional hearings into the case of the jet engines. There really is no other way in a wartime logistics pipeline. The cargo airplanes land one after another. All the labor and equipment is dedicated to unloading the airplane as fast as possible and loading on waiting trucks. The loaded trucks drive out the exit gate. Aircraft take off as soon as they are emptied to repeat a cargo run. Empty trucks come in the entry gate and queue up to go on the tarmac for loading. There is no room in the process for a loaded truck to enter the premise, or for an empty plane to wait around. There is no labor or equipment available to do loading in the reverse direction either. And that's just the simplified version. There are many more nodes in the system expecting unidirectional flow. The goal is to get as much stuff into the war zone as fast as possible. Anything deviating from this goal is wasteful. The big bottleneck in Amazon's process is probably, among others, how inefficient it would be to restock individual items in the warehouse.

oska 6y ago
This reads like a rationalisation to me. I would guess that the forces that beat the US in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese & the Viet Cong, were far more parsimonious in their resource use and put effort into extracting their equipment. Of course, in the Vietnam War, the corporations back in the US who were making huge profits in supplying the war weren't at all worried about equipment being wasted overseas and not returned. And so we're back at the US military industrial complex and all of its unethical madness, famously satirised by Heller in Catch-22.

oska 6y ago

This reads like a rationalisation to me. I would guess that the forces that beat the US in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese & the Viet Cong, were far more parsimonious in their resource use and put effort into extracting their equipment. Of course, in the Vietnam War, the corporations back in the US who were making huge profits in supplying the war weren't at all worried about equipment being wasted overseas and not returned. And so we're back at the US military industrial complex and all of its unethical madness, famously satirised by Heller in Catch-22.