The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
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Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#2A 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 The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be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.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#3[flagged]
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#4Many 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"?
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#5Change 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.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#6When 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.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#7Change 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 efficien…
Isn’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.
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#8Many 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"?
I 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".
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#9When 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.
> 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?
Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
#10A 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.