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The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
- kayo_20211030 3mo agoA very insightful, and correct, piece. I'll quote in full the following, which I think gets to the heart of the matter. If you have no push, you can't apply pressure to the point. > The notion that amateurs talk tactics and professionals talk logistics is frequently discussed in military academies and war colleges, yet it is rarely reflected in the Army’s budget requests or modernization priorities. The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined. In modern warfare, the tail is the primary target. If the tail is severed, the teeth are rendered useless.
- aprentic 3mo agoIt's always about logistics. The Three Kingdoms War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history. It was largely enabled by the invention of the wheelbarrow.
- Linell 3mo agoDo you have any more information about this?
- 9question1 3mo agoProbably talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_ox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_ox. This page suggests this may be a bit of a myth
- silvestrov 3mo agoOne of the most interesting innovations in the Ukraine war is their internal market place for drones, letting each drone group decide which drones they want to procure and use in battle. It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
- homeonthemtn 3mo agoI hadn't heard this before. Do you have a good article on it? I'd be curious to learn more
- abejfehr 3mo agoThey might be referring to the e-Points system, where hitting targets awards points and you can trade the points in for drones, etc
- zhengyi13 3mo agoThey literally gamified it? Amazing.
- esseph 3mo agoFrom what I remember: Equipment was worth more than a capture. Capture was worth more than a kill (get Intel, trade for Ukranian captives). Kill was xyz points. The more points, the more weapons, equipment, and support you got. This was several years ago, I'm not sure its still in play.
- elictronic 3mo agoIt is. Article from last month. https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-e-points-system-steers-units-toward-more-strategic-targets-2026-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-e-points-system-stee...
- fragmede 3mo agoThat's fascinating, thank you for sharing. A market economy lets individual optimize from the bottom up.
- holoduke 3mo agoPeople talk like Ukraine is the first one doing this. Already in WW2 pilots had similar gamification where proof had to be filmed or with minimum witnesses. It probably goed back even further.
- larrik 3mo agoThey should probably rename it from "tail" to "neck" and watch the attitudes shift immediately.
- mcswell 3mo agoOr maybe "dentures"?
- ykonstant 3mo agoThat will certainly resonate with the generals (≧▽≦)
- danhodgins 3mo agoIf the tail is gone, the dentures become useless
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoTooth to tail is crappy PC/corporate-approved rename. The concept used to have a bunch of arrow and spear related names and a bunch of informal phallic counterparts all of which are better suited to the fundamental workflow of mechanized offensive operations.
- LPisGood 3mo agoFor curiosity’s sake, what were these things referred to historically and informally?
- xvedejas 3mo agoReading between the lines, it sounds like it was probably one of "tip"/"point"/"head" and "shaft", or similar
- cucumber3732842 3mo agoThe spear analogy dates at least as far back as 1940. Heavy mechanized units as the tip and then reinforcing units behind them, further units to secure flanks, logistics flow. From the metal differences across the head of a spear (something that people who have a passing familiarity of artillery or naval gunnery will be able to relate to) the finish of the handle to keep the wood in good shape the analogies basically write themselves. The dick jokes are an obvious follow on.
- alansaber 3mo agoThe driving force of peacetime military procurement and organisation is bureaucracy. Hence we see the real developments in military doctrine from Ukraine, Iran etc.
- phkahler 3mo agoThe US military knows full well the importance of logistics. TFA is somehow arguing for distributed distribution networks that are harder to track and attack. Why not advocate for improved defenses along the supply lines? Or is it down to percentages where just one good hit has large effect?
- zipy124 3mo agoThey argue for both no? Increased armour for logistics, but also the notion that yes, if one good hit destroys your whole stockpile then you would need a 100% success rate defense mechanism which is impossible when you can be overwhelmed by the number of drones/missiles seen in modern warfare.
- maxglute 3mo agoKnowing logistics is important =/= able to adapt logistics to modern environment. Last 40-50 years US adversaries couldn't really contest/degrade US logistics at scale. Article is suggesting with new tech, they probably could, and hence may have to redo the entire system for distributed survivability / operate under chaos. Aka 60/70% of the force (the tail) is going to have to change the way they do things. It's hard to make 60/70% of org change, especially the boring bureaucratic/logistics part built around predictability, who are going to want to stay predictable and insist everything is fine with these minor changes, until its not.
- rawgabbit 3mo agoUkraine is deploying AI enabled drones that require no fiber optic wires and no electronic tethering. They patrol autonomously and identify targets; a human authorizes the strike and they take out targets by themselves. This is the holy grail of modern warfare; destroy the enemy’s rear staging and logistics. If they don’t have fuel or ammo, they are a defenseless sitting target.
- nickphx 3mo agohuh? how does one keep a human in the loop for decision making it there is not an 'electronic tether'?
- dahart 3mo ago> A very insightful, and correct, piece. I agree, or at least it feels insightful and right, though I can’t personally validate if it’s correct. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, stop using contractors & no-bid contracts, or simply ask for more? Looks like military spending is currently ~20% of all Federal Revenue at somewhere close to $1T, and it exceeds the combined spending of China and Russia by maybe 2x. Are we wanting to go back to 1960’s 50% of Federal Revenue? Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T? Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
- tclancy 3mo ago>who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen It's at wespoint.edu. The US military has a long and proud history of really good thinkers writing insightful and important pieces the government then ignores. My outsider impression has always been there was a freedom of ideas there. Don't get used to it though as Pete Hesgeth is fixing it fast as he can.
- nradov 3mo agoForeign military budget numbers are largely fake and can't be attempted to be believed. China's government spending isn't publicly released and can't be independently verified. A lot of what the US considers to be military spending falls into separate categories in China. At least on a purchasing power parity basis their actual spending is probably close to ours now, maybe even higher.
- ecshafer 3mo agoThis is a good point that shows the weakness in a lot of these comparing military budgets. Imagine an example where one country spends $1000 per soldier and another spends $100k per soldier. IF they both field 100 soldiers. One budget is 100x the other, but by PPP they are equal. A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member. US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
- zcw100 3mo agoI guess you're just supposed to read Clausewitz not actually understand it.
- Someone 3mo agoHistorically, that was phrased as “an army marches on its stomach” I think that’s an apt comparison because it was hard to keep an army fed (https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/ https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...)
- asdff 3mo agoIt is kind of interesting seeing the ukraine war tiptoe from actually striking the tail in earnest. We see some attacks on moscow refineries in recent days, yes, but why not full scale targeting of total industrial collapse of the russian state? Similarly, why doesn't Kyiv look like Gaza? I guess ukraine doesn't want to be slapped equally hard. We see this in the iran war too. Small scale, targeted attacks to some cherry pieces of infrastructure to make headlines and perhaps bring people to the negotiating table, while all the power and capability is there to wipe Iran back to the stone age if so inclined. I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
- siriusastrebe 3mo agoMoscow could only accomplish this with nukes, and only early in the war. By this point Ukraine has dug underground for most of its crucial war-sustaining industry. Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
- asdff 3mo agoWhy can they not use firebombing and other conventional munitions? If they can deliver a nuke surely they can deliver a conventional warhead. That is enough to level an urban area as we see in Gaza.
- siriusastrebe 3mo agoRussia fires conventional warheads into Kiev all the time. Thousands of civilians have been killed and injured. The city survives. Buildings in Kiev aren't made out of wood. Firebombs would do very little damage.
- lostlogin 3mo agoIsrael levelled Gaza after capturing the area, with artillery and with air strikes. Russia hasn’t captured Kiev, their artillery can’t reach that far and they don’t have air superiority - Russia hardly has an airforce anymore.
- anonymars 3mo agoAlmost like a Prince Rupert's drop (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert's_drop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Rupert's_drop)
- pfortuny 3mo agoThe first thought when moving people must be "where/how will they shit?" Only once this is solved can you ask "what will they eat?".
- petesergeant 3mo ago> which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be fundamentally reexamined Current SecDef thinks looking like a war movie hero is more important, however, so action on this front may be delayed.
- iwontberude 3mo agoGiven the defense budget recently doubled and they lose account of trillions of dollars, I guess I don’t see how they aren’t spending money on the tail.
- preetham_rangu 3mo ago[flagged]
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoMany complain on negativism in HN comments, but how in the world can a sane person express anything positive when there's a hell-bent will in conjunction with the "next war"?
- paulluuk 3mo agoI consider myself an optimist, but given that the US has been in 229 wars over it's 249 years since founding, it seems highly unlikely that there wouldn't be a "next war".
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoMy point is that war is the worst thing that humans can engage in, and that the prevailing sentiment is that constant war is an immutable status-quo, and hence it's okay, there's nothing we can do except downvoting those fucking negativists.
- abtinf 3mo agoWar is not nearly the worst thing. Not even in the top 10.
- wartywhoa23 3mo agoOh, really? I'd like to see your top 10.
- abtinf 3mo agoThings that are worse than war, a wildly incomplete list, in no particular order: Pogroms; slavery; totalitarian dictatorship; theocracy; intentional mass starvation; mass organ harvesting; mass forced relocation; anarchy; failing to respond to unprovoked violence; restricting freedom instead of defeating the adversary.
- 3mo ago
- causality0 3mo agoChange is not going to happen until it's forced. The US military was born as a force required to rebuff existential threats. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the gravitational center of the US military has been the profit margins of defense contractors. What creates the greatest profit? Centralization. Why have a dozen logistics centers when you can have one big one? A trillion dollar fighter program more efficiently absorbs tax dollars than half a dozen specialized vehicle programs from mid-sized companies. Why get congress to pay you to make cheap drones when you can get them to pay you to build $4M Patriot missiles? The MBAs have been riding the US military into the dirt for forty years and I don't think it's going to stop any time soon.
- kasey_junk 3mo agoIsn’t the American military logistics the most decentralized supply chain in the world? Famously (perhaps apocryphal) _every congressional district_ has jobs in the military logistics supply chain.
- causality0 3mo agoIt would be decentralized if the same things were being built in different places. The way US government manufacturing is set up is more like taking all your organs out, sticking each of them in a separate room, and piping the blood back and forth. Every item has a mile-long supply chain and attacking any part of it shuts the whole thing down.
- snowpid 3mo agosorry, but the European defence is more decentralised.
- Tostino 3mo agoDecentralization doesn't matter at all if you still have single points of failure everywhere.
- bflesch 3mo agoI agree with your point but it's incredibly naive to identify "the MBAs" as scapegoat for this problem. We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec]. The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/troops-being-told-to-prepare-for-armageddon-in-iran_n_69a6ffe3e4b076ac5d63c82c https://www.huffpost.com/entry/troops-being-told-to-prepare-... [2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-epsteins-135504975.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-eps...
- bad_haircut72 3mo agoWhen Russia invaded Ukraine, nobody (even the Ukranians) imagined that 5 years later they would have their own missiles hammering Russia 2500kms in the rear. Americans need to start accepting that a) the Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years and b) Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking.
- mcphage 3mo ago> Iran will probably in a better place than they are now, strategically speaking How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
- jandrese 3mo agoThey'll be getting the Hormuz toll money.
- xp84 3mo agoIt’s an odd declaration and maybe based on Rus/Ukraine. But Ukraine is doing better now than in the first week of the “Special Military Operation” due to having a lot of rich allies who have (in fits and starts) given them a lot of money and gear, and due to a Russia which has stretched its military and economy to the breaking point. By contrast, Iran’s only allies are its terrorist affiliates in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Houthis. Those guys can’t do much to help. China and Russia (see above though) are willing to do business with them but don’t really give a crap about Iran surviving. Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former. Iran though will not be better off for it, I’m pretty confident. (Other than their surviving religious fanatics will be even more suicidally devout.)
- pjc50 3mo agoI believe the assessment is based on the desire of the US to offer concessions (such as sanctions withdrawal) in order to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Which will be painful in the medium term, but less so in the long run as oil is diverted around it.
- Stevvo 3mo agoA limited view of the threat. All very well worrying about keeping your armored brigade combat team fueled up, but that won't be much use when the same weapons that threaten the logistics have destroyed all the Abrams and Bradleys that use the fuel. The Army is still under the delusion that its possible to win a peer conflict, not having learnt the lesson of the cold war there will be no winners in this hypothetical fight.
- HelloMcFly 3mo agoThis piece seems logical and correct. It also seems entirely AI-generated, but I suppose we've moved into a world where that's just the way content is now.
- ranger207 3mo agoNah that's just the way defense essays have sounded for the past 20 years or so
- Noumenon72 3mo agoYes, I disagree with Pangram on this. It's a very familiar style, so familiar that things that might look like LLM-isms in another context actually give a smooth feeling of fitting the style exactly.
- BadBadJellyBean 3mo agoMaybe it is. Maybe it isn't. You gain nothing from pointing out every post that seems LLM generated. Read it or don't but we don't make the world better by accusing each other of using LLMs. The only things we increase are mistrust and frustration.
- HelloMcFly 3mo agoThere is no "maybe", it is at least largely AI-generated though I'm sure there's a human involved in building the perspective. Run it through any checker you can find, the outcome is without doubt. I don't think I've made a similar comment elsewhere on Hacker News, reddit, etc., (nor do I plan to make a habit of it) but this one stuck out to me. I know this because I did read it just as I've read previous posts such as these on West Point through the years. This just isn't how things used to be written. It's a little more ambiguous out in the wild on any given site/blog/etc. > The only things we increase are mistrust and frustration Mistrust of what? The human voice behind this thought? Yes, I think that mistrust is valid and earned. Nevertheless, I admit the topic seems pertinent and the argument has merit.
- haunter 3mo ago> If history provides the theory, the ongoing war in Ukraine offers a brutal contemporary lesson: Modern armies collapse when they run out of logistics, not when they run out of weapons. Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
- realusername 3mo ago"Amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics" Napoleon
- tristramb 3mo agoHe learnt the hard way (as did all those who followed him into Russia)
- orthoxerox 3mo agoNapoleon planned his Russian campaign extensively: he had supply hubs set up all over the Duchy of Warsaw, with feeder routers from Prussia keeping them full. What he didn't anticipate was how bad the roads in Russia would be and how long the Russian army would retreat along them. You can't resupply an army that is marching on a narrow dirt road through a forest because it's blocking its own supply lines.
- lostlogin 3mo agoIf you’re going to Russia for the winter, have somewhere to stay and take a jacket. Napoleon screwed up the logistics with all his assumptions.
- orthoxerox 3mo agoNapoleon lost the bulk of his army in the summer.
- hvs 3mo ago
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hunmernop 3mo agoSo many armchair quarterbacks
- bee_rider 3mo agoThe “game” has been reinvented recently, there aren’t any non-armchair quarterbacks. Thankfully.
- AlexCoventry 3mo agoThere's likely a major world war brewing. Should I not be thinking and forming opinions about that? It's probably going to profoundly affect me.
- apawloski 3mo ago[dead]
- thrownawaysz 3mo ago>the difficulty of transporting extremely heavy 155-millimeter artillery shells and guided multiple-launch rocket system pods across contested oceans and degraded theater road networks I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
- LinuxAmbulance 3mo ago> I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary. Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher. Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
- kylehotchkiss 3mo agoFor better and for worse our country is armed to the teeth with civilians who would take great offense to a foreign military invasion
- AlexCoventry 3mo agoAccording to Zelensky, there will be drones capable of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers within a couple of years. The US mainland is definitely at risk of drone attack in the near-medium term, IMO. > One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2042105223989035429 https://x.com/nexta_tv/status/2042105223989035429
- siriusastrebe 3mo agoI did some digging, reaction engines are jet engines that can transition into a rocket propelled mode. It could enable a single stage to orbit plane. Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel. So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
- mcswell 3mo agoI was puzzled by this: "...the Army must reinvest in up-armoring its logistical fleet. While adding armor reduces payload capacity and increases fuel consumption, violating the peacetime gospel of efficiency, it is a mandatory trade-off for survival." Where are the armored vehicles now in Ukraine? I don't hear much about them, and I thought that was because drones can find the weaknesses in armor. Instead the emphasis now seems to be on rapidly moving logistical vehicles (and even, for the Russians, on hand-carried "stuff", which seems unlikely to be sustainable). Can someone who knows more than I do comment on this?
- mpyne 3mo ago> Where are the armored vehicles now in Ukraine? A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia? And as it turns out, they have indeed started adding armor to transport craft, including trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei And despite Ukrainian strikes earlier, the Russian bridge over the Kerch strait remains standing and in use for some (not all) logistical supply from Russia to Crimea, and this is due in no small amount due to the amount of 'armoring' that is inherent to the design of a bridge that must cross a strait of that size. It's a question of cost more than anything, the more expensive a transport means becomes to build, the more it makes sense to start including armor to force an attack on that transport to itself have to invest a lot more for success.
- asdff 3mo agoBut it also stands to ask, why isn't the bridge being constantly targeted? What factors are weighing ukrainian decisionmaking to not simply strike the hell out of this bridge until it falls? The strikes ukraine makes in russian territory seem like they are extremely successful but limited in quantity and scope. Why not push that envelope? Some factors must exist that prefer these attacks to be small scale headline makers vs actual large scale destruction.
- ElevenLathe 3mo ago
- red_admiral 3mo agoI would not underestimate the power of a fully mobilized USA. If we really need to, we can do a lot of things that would die to bureaucracy in peacetime - see WWII.
- asdff 3mo agoI read there was actually significant war exhaustion among the public towards the end, contrary to the patriotism lens this time in history is frequently shown with. There was also a lot of effort to censor what was actually happening in the war from the public, both in terms of press coverage and in screening soldier letters to home. I'm not sure how long the american war machine can actually last. All the post WWII wars are characterized by significant public war exhaustion. And these days you are going to have the other side posting on social media POV videos of american soldiers getting decimated by drones.
- lostlogin 3mo agoWhat’s more damaging at home? Pictures of your own soldiers dying, or video of the war crimes they are committing? Sadly, most wars generate both.
- asdff 3mo agoBoth I'd say. These were both large issues for morale during Vietnam with how that war was increasingly documented and stretching on quite long with no real victory condition.
- marking-time 3mo ago"see WWII" ... I agree, however it is very unfortunate that we have off-shored so much of our industrial capacity.
- yborg 3mo agoI wonder when the use of 'culminate', v. "reach a climax or point of highest development" for "cease to be effective" became the standard in military-related writing when trying to sound smart. The original usage in the specific context of an army's advance or offensive coming to an end made some sense but it's now used as basically a wordy synonym for "stops" in any context.
- coffeecantcode 3mo agoNot to mention the closing paragraph of the article essentially says the same thing 8 times - for such a well written paper the closing paragraph was a real disappointment in my eyes. Overall though, good write up.
- m_dupont 3mo agoI'm also loving their phrase "on a nonlinear battlefield" ... not sure what a linear battlefield would be
- wilkommen 3mo agoI think a linear battlefield is one in which there is a "front line", which was a given for prior wars but maybe not as much anymore. Future wars might see adversarial forces mixed among each other spatially more than in the past.
- eszed 3mo agoStatic (relatively, at least) battle lines? Think of WWI: you knew where the danger was, and where it wasn't. Not that I know anything in particular about this piece of military jargon, but that's my contextually-informed supposition.
- dredmorbius 3mo ago[dead]
- neocodesoftware 3mo agoWhat’s missing - the cost of armoring and weaponizing logistics. Maybe easier to invent a new “startup” logistics than replace the old - especially when he talks about a new autonomous delivery in kill zones.
- moi2388 3mo ago“ In a future peer conflict, the US Army will not be granted a six-month, uncontested build-up phase, nor will it operate under friendly skies.” Depends how the war starts. Russia? USA somehow attacks? Easily 6 months of buildup in Europe. China? Again USA somehow attacks? Again buildup in Australia, Japan, Korea. Also US air power is absolutely supreme. I don’t see how they will be fighting in actually contested skies even only 2 months in.
- siriusastrebe 3mo agoAir power relies on fuel and maintenance and runways. It's not necessary to contest the skies if the adversary can destroy the "tail" that supplies the aircraft. Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down. The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
- lenerdenator 3mo agoThe entire body of assumptions that the post-Cold War US military was built on is flawed. China didn't democratize, Russia's oligarchs didn't stop using NATO as their boogeyman, and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states. All of that was assumed to be true. The US would do small police actions here and there with highly-specialized forces. The rules-based system would more-or-less do the rest. In the meantime we gutted not only the logistics but the manufacturing base needed to feed that system so that we could "cut costs"... which didn't really happen anyways. We should be throwing people in prison over this.
- amanaplanacanal 3mo agoWe usually wait for people to break laws and be convicted before we do that.
- lenerdenator 3mo agoI'm sure we could find one. It's the military-industrial complex. It exists to facilitate corruption.
- Laurel1234 3mo ago> and the world isn't willing to turn dictatorships and ultraconservative theocracies into pariah states. The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.
- briandw 3mo agoThese systems are antifragile. Just like what was exposed by the supply chain shock during covid. You optimize like crazy to squeeze every bit of efficiency (I know it's the military, so this is relative) out of a system when times are good / easy. Then the game changes a little and the entire thing comes apart. The US military has been operating in an uncontested space for far too long and there is major weakness in all the unprotected assets away from the front. Think about all the aircraft that are unprotected and near civilians. A project spiderweb in the US would be relatively easy and devastating. The US military needs to get their butt in gear and take action to close those vulnerabilities.
- phyzome 3mo agoBy antifragile, do you mean fragile?
- briandw 3mo agoI mean that when you have a system like this and you don’t stress it, it becomes more likely to fail catastrophically. It’s like the Dodo bird. It evolved in the absence of predators, so was easily made extinct. Had the island had dogs the entire time, the Dodo would have evolved to survive.
- recitedropper 3mo agoI agree with you--but just fyi I think "antifragile" is generally used in the opposite to what you mean. If I'm remember correctly Taleb has tried to coin it as a precise word to describe the inverse of your phenomena: Systems that prioritize robustness over optimizations, and therefore can handle stress effectively.
- briandw 3mo agoThe point is that stress makes some things stronger. Stress doesn’t make a tea cup stronger because a tea cup is fragile. Stress makes a body or organization stronger if its not too much and the system can adapt. A body in zero g gets sick, but is healthy in 1 g.
- bix6 3mo agoDoes the US have any initiatives to fix this? Like I keep hearing about reshoring manufacturing but is there actually a concerted effort? It seems like we get a major plant announcement every now and then for some behemoth but is there anything targeted for the SMB or startup space?
- a34729t 3mo agoChina has missed their window of opportunity, sadly. For the next big war, the US will simply not even need to air or sea to deliver weapons or supplies (see SpaceX's StarFall, of which 60x4 should fit into Starship). Per my calculations, the JDAM version of this will be cheaper than flying planes (and pilots) to drop bombs or cruise missiles. For small(er) wars, cheap drones break everything as they can destroy your backfield. Unless of course you happen to move your backfield into orbit and beyond.
- pphysch 3mo agoOpportunity for what?
- greekrich92 3mo agoNot sure if you've noticed, but none of that SpaceX stuff is going to happen
- marcusverus 3mo agoL̶a̶u̶n̶c̶h̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶i̶v̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶.̶ ̶ ̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶a̶l̶.̶ ̶ ̶M̶e̶g̶a̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶E̶O̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶m̶.̶ ̶ ̶S̶t̶a̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶ Starfall will never happen!
- shimman 3mo agoNo serious really argued that; what they argued is that a Mars colony is impractical, interplanetary travel as a fantasy, and data centers in space as delusional.
- Robotbeat 3mo agoHaving followed SpaceX since the beginning, this is not true at all. People doubted every single step. Industry experts did.
- w10-1 3mo agoIf decisions are actually being made based on analogies instead of analysis, the whole thing is brittle. The entire military is predicated on physical possession and distance; that's the main reason Ukraine is a quagmire, Iran was a no-go, and Taiwan has been relatively safe. But the next real war for the US is not for territory but to destroy its economic and financial leverage, and destroy its ability to produce those -- by cutting academic research, firing military and intelligence leadership, alienating allies, creating divisions that paralyze democracy, crashing the market, overloading government debt, and binding the Fed, so any response would be muddled and capital and people find opportunity elsewhere. Hence the political enlistment of the poor and unemployed on one hand, and single-minded capitalists on the other, to the same ends. The trillions of dollars in AI spending and on the military do nothing to address this, and indeed make it worse by exhausting resources for real solutions.
- dfedbeef 3mo agoAlmost all of those things have happened already except for the market crash
- skywhopper 3mo agoNot sure we need to wait for the next war. The Iran war has shown some pretty major holes in US military (mostly Navy) logistics already when they aren’t picking a fight with someone who can’t fight back at all.
- kens 3mo agoSerious question: does Figure 1 in the article make sense to anyone? If you understand the symbols, do you look at the diagram and it's clear how logistics works?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- CapricornNoble 3mo agoYes. It depicts how supplies arrive at a port, move via roads to a logistics organization that is brigade-sized, assigned to support a corps. It depicts the subordinate units within that logistics organization (the Army calls these "Sustainment Brigades"). From there supplies go to the corps's subordinate divisions. Within one of those divisions, the supplies go to/between sustainment batalions. From there, supplies go to support battalions and maintenance companies at the division's subordinate brigades. Also, along the top you can see supplies delivered from outside of the AO directly to airfields within a Division Support Area. They can also be moved via air from Corps-level airfields. The icons there depict medium and heavy lift utility helicopters. Ask your favorite LLM for a brief tutorial on "NATO unit symbology" and "logistics-related operational terms and graphics". The relevant publication is "MIL-STD-2525D". https://www.jcs.mil/portals/36/documents/doctrine/other_pubs/ms_2525d.pdf https://www.jcs.mil/portals/36/documents/doctrine/other_pubs...
- diddid 3mo agoThis has been true for as long as war has been a thing. The Army logistics won’t break, it’ll adapt, because that’s what war machines do. What’s good today isn’t good tomorrow. It’s a nice piece but nothing Sun Tzu or a good game of hearts of iron couldn’t teach you.
- awfafawf 3mo agoLOL IRAN NOT MENTIONED ONCE AND WE SUPPOSED TO TAKE THIS SERIO? THE MAN POINTING OUT THE PROBLEM - HE IS THE PROBLEM.
- wilkommen 3mo agoThe arguments in this article seem very similar in spirit to the ones mad in "The Sling and the Stone" book by Thomas X. Hammes.
- marking-time 3mo agoI just finished listening to a series of podcasts on Crusades I-IV. It is interesting to note that logistics were as important then as they are today. Many battles were influenced by the simple things like food and water availability. In the IV Crusade, financial logistics became one of the key factors. As for the article, when the institution that trains future generals says we have a problem then we should _listen_.
- 0x59 3mo agoWWII? Fabius did this to Hannibal more than a thousand years ago. The core of his strategy was to dunk on supplies, stall, and have the Carthaginians run out of food. I imagine Iran, Ukraine, and Russia all know about Fabian strategy.
- stevenwoo 3mo agoIt appears that Ukraine is executing on this (after building up its internal defense production), and Russia is not adjusting well, yet. https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/09/ukraine-russia-war-theory-victory-putin-zelensky-crimea-missiles-deep-strikes-oil-refinieries/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/09/ukraine-russia-war-theo...
- ychnd 3mo agoMore than two thousands years ago! Time flies ;)
- phlipski 3mo agoNukes prevented global super powers from going to war against each other for the past 80 years. Maybe the vast democratization and spread of cheap drones will prevent all these stupid little wars that have been fought since WWII. One can hope at least. The whole idea of the US going to war against China is idiotic once any half witted person spends at least 2 minutes thinking about the implications... But hey - it's been great for the military-industrial complex to profit off the fear mongering!
- mmooss 3mo agoHow much would electrification reduce the fuel logistics burden? Electricity can be moved anywhere in the world instantly, if you can dig a trench and lay cables. The problem, of course, is density, some combination of (energy OR power) per (liter OR gram) depending on the application: Batteries don't come close to the energy/power density of jet fuel, but what about whatever fuel armored vehicles use? And what about other electrical storage options, such as hydrogen fuel cells? Some options might be uneconomical in a civilian environment where logisitics is relatively cheap but fine in a warfare environment where logisitics is far more expensive both in moving assets and in the consequences of logisitical failure. Also, I'm assuming vehicles consume most of the fuel, but maybe there are other significant applications? And I'm assuming throughput on electrical lines is sufficient - it's fast but how much energy can you move per hour? - but that's something I've never had to think about.
- protocolture 3mo ago> but what about whatever fuel armored vehicles use? In WW2 when low on fuel they would gassify combustible items and run that through the engines. The germans called it Holzgas. You could rig this up in the field. It wasnt good mind but the vehicles could move about when logistics fell through. The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless. It would become a game of finding and destroying power cables.
- mmooss 3mo agoInteresting. Maybe you could charge your electric vehicles on local supplies and/or carry emergency generators for charging that burn whatever input that is available, including wind, solar, and maybe even cranks, or that can be made, a la Holzgas. Also, you could charge one electrical device from others - even others at a distance. > The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless. I think buried electrical cables would be much more appealing than being tied to roads and trucks full of gasoline. Electrical cables are easy to lay, probably by uncrewed ground or even air vehicles, and could be done quickly with optimization. Redundancy would be cheap and easy, creating a network with few single points of failure. And keeping some generators close to the front, you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
- mmooss 3mo agoIt's important not to overreact: Early concepts of aircraft in warfare, between WWI and WWII, often said aircraft would make battle lines irrelevant. They assumed nothing could stop aircraft. It didn't work out that way. Now people say the same about small, uncrewed aircraft (drones). It's based only on a few years of very early adoption - even among technologists in vast, public, civilian markets, who can make predictions like that? Very possibly defenses will improve substantially and possibly defense will gain the advantage or even dominate. I don't believe anyone knows. One difference between crewed and uncrewed aircraft is that the latter are much less expensive, and easily adopted by forces with minimal resources. The Taliban were not going to build or buy effective crewed fighter planes or bombers - they could not cross NATO battle lines in that way - but now they could build or buy drones.
- vondur 3mo agoYep, how long does it take to replace an F-35 or one Reaper drone? In WW2 we probably could have buried Germany in the amount of tanks we could produce. We are like Germany from WW2 now, with hand stitched upholstery in our Tiger Tanks.
- susiecambria 3mo agoI know nothing about the topic BUT I can remember John Kirby and Jake Sullivan regularly talking logistics, Poland, and other things mentioned here. I don't think I've heard those things from this administration's reps. Not sure if not hearing is good or bad. I sure learned a bunch from Kirby and Sullivan, though.
- elzbardico 3mo agoAs Stalin said: in a war, quantity is a quality in itself.
- gerdesj 3mo agoMy old man used to say: "an army marches on its stomach". Most people hereabouts will be wittering on about how best to kill people/do stuff with drones and forget that logistics is rather more complicated than killing things. Fundamentally: people need food, water and shelter. Vehicles need fuel, mechanics and stuff. Killing people and destroying stuff needs ammunition or at least something sharp (and that will need something to keep it sharp). Then you need to coordinate all this stuff, along with comms and a lot more details that I've not mentioned. Then you need to persuade your troops to do their medieval best on the opposition and hope it works.
- bandrami 3mo agoThis is a pendulum I've now seen fully swing twice since I enlisted 30 years ago. "We need more integrated logistics because the teeth can't fight without the tail!" Some years pass "Why do we have all these non-combat roles in the military? Shrink everything down and focus on warfighting!" More years pass "Why can't we do any support internally? We need stronger and more integrated logistics!" Lather, rinse, repeat.
- douglee650 3mo agoIronically, the text color choice on the website reflects exactly this kind of thinking.
- jmyeet 3mo agoA lot of people end up commenting on current and potential conflicts clearly knowing nothing about logistics and it shows. I think this whenever I see "China will invade Taiwan". But it also shows up when people don't realize the Iran war is unwinnable and was unwinnable from the start. First, China. 100 miles of open ocean separate mainland China and Taiwan. To invade you need to put boots on the ground. That means you also need armor. And then you need everything that goes with that. Food, medical, resupply, ammunition, a place to repair your vehicles and so on. You can't airlift this, even with air supremacy. It requires ships, a lot of ships. And that means Taiwan, the US and allies could, if they wanted to, wreak havoc with supply lines. I've seen one estimate that it would take over a million soldiers for China to occupy Taiwan, possibly two million. China simply does not have that amphibious capability so this is a silly conversation. American politicians talks this up to give more money to weapopns manufacturers for weapon systems that are too expensive and don't work and also to propagandize the population into "China = bad". But it's not a real threat. On a clear day from Calais you can see the white cliffs of Dover. I believe the distance at its closest point is 17 miles. Yet despite having an Army that exceeded 12 million soldiers, Germany was unable to invade Britain. This is big of a problem water was then. It hasn't changed. Second, Iran. Iran is surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and the Persian Gulf on the 4th. There is nowhere where a US invasion could muster like they did with Kuwait (ie from Saudi Arabia). We saw the futility of this in the Iran-Iraq war, which was a complete stalemate (with over a million dead) despite an almost decade of the US supplying Saddam Hussein. So with mountains on 3 sides, that leaves an amphibious landing. Again, the problem remains of where would troops muster? It can't be anywhere beyond the Strait of Hormuz because the Navy can't defend against drone and missile attacks at close range like that, let alone get thousands of supply ships through safely. So that leaves Pakistan or Oman. Both are in range of drone attacks. The US has essentially abandoned all Gulf bases because of the complete inability to defend them. How would the US defend a million troops and all the supplies they need, including landing craft? Logisitcally, the operation would be as complex and large as D-Day. The US doesn't have that military anymore. The Navy has a pair of amphibious landing craft that could put 5000 Marines somewhere. Great. They'd die. For enough infantry, you'd need a draft. You'd need to build so many ships. It would take years and nobody has that kind of time. The Joint Chiefs know this. It's why no US president has started a war with Iran despite the Israeli PM asking every one of them to do so since at least Reagan. It's only this president who took the bait of Mossad telling him how the regime would fall within days after a decapitation strike. The entire Iranian military project is to resist the US military. Bases buried in mountains, cheap ballistic missiles and drones that can be mass-produced, a mosaic defense to avoid potential decapitation and air defenses that are seemingly good enough that the US, even with F35s, still has to stand off. I bet you won't find a single serious military planner who thought this operation was possible.
- JeremyHerrman 3mo ago> In large-scale combat operations, victory will depend less on which force fields the most advanced weapons and more on which can sustain combat power under persistent attack. "force fields" had me reading that sentence entirely wrong
- txoria 3mo agoPresumably, the article is intended for military officers. Do military officers have nothing better to do than strain their eyes, reading a light gray text on a white background? And the article gives advice on strain-proof logistics, no less. Seems like Modern War Institute is more concerned with looking posh, than getting their message across - the message of endurance. That's ironic.
- pards 3mo ago> a light grey text on a white background This makes the page SO hard to read. Why are "designers" still doing this? Have they no respect for their readers?
- zhdc1 3mo agoGood article but, like a lot of stategic studies pieces, grossly underestimates what the American industrial base is capable of. 1. The US is second in the world, behind Ukraine, in military drone production. 2. The US is a close second to China in logistics + last mile drone production. 3. The US is still the only country with the proven ability to move mass anywhere in the world. None of this means that the US will win a hot war against China. However, that has - always - been the case. The US fought against China in Korea and SE Asia/Vietnam and had the opportunity twice to move the conflict into Chinese territory. They didn't, for obvious reasons. Geography + LOCs + population are a b***h.
- eimrine 3mo agoAre there any vessels proved to move mass anywhere, which are still alive from the latest moving mass happened? AFAIK, all those ships are not in service, and all American males got somewhat femalified.
- zhdc1 3mo agoYes, well over a hundred iirc that the US can requisition on day one of a conflict. America still leads here. Worth noting that, outside of WW2, the US has never really had a large merchant fleet.
- lljk_kennedy 3mo ago"No-one can match out tririme fleet, or move men as quickly through the Mediterranean" - Athens circa 440 CE
- latentframe 3mo agoPrecision weapons are shifting the center of gravity from firepower to logistics. Industrial capacity, redundancy, and resilience may matter more than having the most advanced platforms.
- tim333 3mo ago>Modern armies collapse when they run out of logistics It'll be interesting to see how that goes in Ukraine where Russia has ~700k troops and the logistics are being cut by Hornet drones and similar.
- austin-cheney 3mo agoI did cyber defense for the army for more than 10 years before moving into logistics. Logistics is far more complex and challenging. I can see from many of the comments here people generally have absolutely no idea what logistics management comprises. Let this be a lesson on Dunning-Kruger.
- Havoc 3mo agoWould sure be helpful to have bases in cooperative allied countries to help with logistics…so best not to threaten and shit on them at every diplomatic encounter…
- eagerpace 3mo agoIt’s ok for it to break as long as the enemy’s breaks first. I don’t see anything comparing this to other armies. Air superiority doesn’t exist in the Ukraine war and I question how many lessons can truly be drawn from it for the US because of that. Not chest pumping here, this just feels a little too in the moment.
- sometimes_all 3mo agoWhat I am really impressed by is that experts and the army itself is open to criticism and commentary (I am sure there are limits, and censoring will be happening on the more important parts), but coming from a country where the government seems to think that any critique is "anti-national", such articles seem like a breath of fresh air. A more open space means better ideas with potential edge get shared, which is better for everyone.
- mandevil 3mo agoThe key is selecting officers for competence, not loyalty. This requires all the other stuff in your country to be set up so that the leaders aren't worried about coups from your own military, but the advantage to getting all of that is that you can have a much more effective military. Why? Because any time junior officers just went through losing a war they are going to be pissed off that they were sent out there to do something that was impossible, and got a lot of their friends killed doing it. And if you let them, they are going to fix your military and make it more effective. My favorite example of this is the unpublished Ph.d thesis from Marshall Michel, The Revolt of the Majors (https://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/595 https://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/595) about all of the junior pilots in the US Air Force who experienced, first hand, how terrible and useless the USAF was during Vietnam and over the course of the 1970's and 1980's built the totally different US Air Force that did Desert Storm. If you are fortunate enough that you don't have the experience of recently losing a war, there will be a smaller number of junior officers who will be worried about losing the next one, and it will take more effort to identify those officers and put them into positions of power, but it is still possible to revolutionize your military without the bitter taste of a defeat. Defeat just makes it so that there are lot more junior officers committed to reform, and they will have the upper-hand over the more senior officers- so long as they are all selected for competence and not loyalty. If promotions are selected with loyalty as the primary factor, then you don't get reform, you get patronage. Sometimes a patronage system can be effective, but it ends up being like the Czarist Russian fleet of 1905: Admiral Makarov was very very good, and everything directly under him was competent, but all of the other admirals varied between mediocre and terrible and the rest of the fleet was as well. After Makarov's ship the Petropavlovsk sank with almost of its officers and men (including him) the Russian Navy gave no further benefit to the state, it was just a sacrifice.
- ody2 3mo agoWhen the hordes of Genghis Khan conquered Asia, how did they deal with logistics? Answer - They didn't. Everything they needed came from the horse. Transportation and food in the form of blood and milk. How could a modern army replicate this? Mobile nuclear powered bioreactors that could create food? Mobile 3d printers that could consume local materials to create ammunition? An interesting thing to think about.