There’s a deeper structural problem that affects almost all military supply chains. Modern military equipment is incredibly expensive, complex, bespoke, and ma

There’s a deeper structural problem that affects almost all military supply chains. Modern military equipment is incredibly expensive, complex, bespoke, and made in small batches. Even in cases when that is not true, as with artillery shells, peacetime supply chains cannot meet wartime demand. Ramping them up takes time, and maintaining them in a constant scaled state of readiness entails an opportunity cost that most societies are not willing to pay. HN readers should know that military supply chains are not like global commercial supply chains. The supply chains that say Apple or Walmart have built are global scale and quickly responsive to demand. That simply does not apply to many military components from manufacturing through assembly and deployment. The timelines are much longer. There are things Ukraine needs that money cannot immediately solve. These bottlenecks are an example. (Fears of escalation are another…) Ukraine is fighting a poor man’s war with a lot of second-hand Cold War equipment and Stingers that served the mujahedeen just as well decades ago. This is partially due to US funding mechanisms. It’s very easy for Biden to exercise discretion in what he sends (and therefore regulate the intensity of the war) through the mechanism of Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which can only draw upon existing DOD stocks. He relies heavily on PDA, thus the nature of the second-hand stuff. What’s interesting is the dual-use piece of the equipment used in Ukraine. By paying frontline soldiers some 5x what they would normally earn, Ukraine has created a market driven by the demand of infantry, usually pooling their purchases in small groups. They are buying all sorts of equipment, notably power banks, satellite ground terminals, mobile devices, from much more responsive supply chains. That is, we have strong revealed preferences of the kind of equipment soldiers buy when their lives depend on it, and it looks very different from the bloat purveyed by primes to the Pentagon. Disclosure: I work with Ukraine Defense Fund to send dual-use tech to the AFU.(Ukrainedefensefund.org)