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The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

mwi.westpoint.edu

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Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#21

Post by wartywhoa23 »

paulluuk wrote: post #8
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #4

Many 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".

My 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.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#22

Post by Linell »

aprentic wrote: post #13
kayo_20211030 wrote: post #2

A 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 The outdated conc…

It'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.

Do you have any more information about this?

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#23

Post by ranger207 »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #18

This 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.

Nah that's just the way defense essays have sounded for the past 20 years or so

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#24

Post by haunter »

> 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.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#25

Post by alansaber »

kayo_20211030 wrote: post #2

A 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 conc…

The driving force of peacetime military procurement and organisation is bureaucracy. Hence we see the real developments in military doctrine from Ukraine, Iran etc.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#26

Post by causality0 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #7
causality0 wrote: post #5

Change 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.

It 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.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#27

Post by jandrese »

mcphage wrote: post #9
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #6

When 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?

They'll be getting the Hormuz toll money.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#28

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #18

This 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.

Maybe 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.

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#29

Post by bflesch »

causality0 wrote: post #5

Change 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…

I 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-...

[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-eps...

Re: The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

#30

Post by wartywhoa23 »

strictnein wrote: post #14
wartywhoa23 wrote: post #4

Many 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"?

Are you under the impression that humanity could reach a state where there is never another major war? I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.

Yes, I am. That requires a total reassesment of who the real enemy is, though (hint: psychopaths at power).
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