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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

#311

Post by lopsotronic »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #177
lopsotronic wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to ponder how it looks when you remove the Chinese supply chain for all those commodity parts. Which will almost certainly be the case if we decide to punch that dance card. Having a boundless cornucopia of servos and radios will affect the shape of your logistics/maintenance/fabrication complex. That's not just a "Ukraine Problem" either.

The US strongly avoids foreign content for this reason. This policy is often the only thing keeping domestic commodity component manufacturing afloat. This is also the main reason Micron is getting a subsidized fab.

The sheer quantity of "mislabelled"[1] PRC origin parts passing through the logistics chains as Primo-A-grade-American-Made - even in Defense - is deeply disturbing, and that's the stuff that they do catch.

Transshipment is the elephant in the room here - smaller components made in PRC, then shipped to wherever as Raw Materials (tm), and then put in a "friendly nation" box and sold as safe.

DoD's DMEA and DLA CD programs, plus GIDEP reporting, capture confirmed cases . . but not the miss rate. On the occasion they do bust open a jet (or god forbid a missile) and look at all the bits with a microscope, it can be scary.

[1] They like to avoid the more precise "criminal fraud"

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

#312

Post by dctoedt »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #58
malfist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state. What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.

Once you've lost something (I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship) then even if you cant win, you also cant leave else its an admission of defeat - so it drags on and on and on.

> I think sooner or later, Iran will succeed in sinking a big US ship

Sinking or even just seriously damaging a U.S. aircraft carrier — approx. 5K people in crew + airwing, billions of dollars in ship and aircraft — might trigger a Pearl-Harbor or 9/11 fury among the American public. No U.S. president could get away with even a "proportionate" response, let alone doing nothing.

Think of the Tonkin Gulf incident in 1965, which led to the U.S.'s widened involvement in Vietnam on the basis of grossly-distorted reports about alleged attacks — which never happened — on U.S. destroyers (which are comparatively small ships). [0] If Iran were to actually sink a U.S. aircraft carrier, then Trump-Hegseth-Miller might well nuke Tehran in response.

We sure as hell don't need anything like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 by a terrorist. It triggered a cascade of some of the stupidest and costliest government decisions in history. Belgrade, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, they all effed it up almost beyond belief. WWI cost millions of lives and untold billions in resources that could have been put to far better use. Iran sinking a U.S. carrier could be a similar trigger.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident

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

#313

Post by sillyfluke »

forshaper wrote: post #35
malfist wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Iran war will also probably still be going on in 5 years The Russia/Ukraine war has a goal, to make Ukraine either part of Russia or a client state. What's the goal of the US/Iran war? So far it seems like the goal is to mostly return to the status quo prior to the war. I can't imagine that could continue 5 years because there's just not an objective. Of course, I could easily be mistaken.

There hasn't been a clear goal for an American war since the first Gulf War.

I'm not sure its accurate to imply that being completely delusional means you have no goal. Gulf War part II had a goal regardless of the deceit involved. The Afghanistan war though I thought took the cake for the sheer delusional premise.

To tie it to the sibling comment about Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown who was the High Representative for Bosina & Herzegovina was also one of the lone voices warning about the Afghanistan war in the beginning.

I wasn't able to find the article containing the original warnings, but here is one article from the early days[0].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/11/britainand9...

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

#314

Post by ponector »

AngryData wrote: post #266
asdff wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why 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.

If you level a city you just removed 95% of the reason for trying to capture that city. Spending untold billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives for a pile of ash would never pay itself off.

But this is exactly how russians are capturing Donbass: each sity they managed to capture for the last two years are total ruins.

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

#315

Post by orthoxerox »

dgacmu wrote: post #179
asdff wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia has been able to target Kyiv and destroy arbitrary apartment buildings the entire war. I've just spent a few mins searching through news articles over the years, there's a story of a destroyed Kyiv apartment in 2022 and one from 3 days ago now in 2026 of course. So why the stayed hand? Clearly Russia then and now is capable of reaching out and destroying Kyiv arbitrarily. I still believe they could have turned…

Russia's inability to have a decisive victory against Ukraine is at odds with the idea that it has sufficient stockpiles and launch capability to reduce kiev to rubble any time it wishes. If it had that capability, it would have the capability to destroy Ukraine's defense manufacturing sector - or simply its entire manufacturing sector - which it clearly does not. It's also at odds with the evidence that Russia is la…

Russia has destroyed most of Ukraine's traditional defense manufacturing sector a long time ago. The problem is that Ukraine has decentralized and/or offshored a lot of its manufacturing.

There's no need for a massive assembly plant to produce a lot of drones from dual-purpose components. Most of these components arrive across the EU border and go to random warehouses that have been converted into assembly shops. There the drones are put together, flashed with the latest firmware and sent to the armed forces, where they are armed and launched.

The bigger problem Russia faces is the surprisingly sorry state of its AA. It's been designed to detect and intercept strategic bombers and multirole fighters, but it's been almost 40 years since Mathias Rust, and it still can't handle a cheap and slow flying target, relying only on point defense systems that can be and are overwhelmed. Ukraine has inherited the same Soviet tech but managed to build a better detection system that collects and processes the data from thousands of cheap listening stations across the country.

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

#316

Post by mmooss »

It'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.

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

#317

Post by cwillu »

zcw100 wrote: post #118
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…

I guess you're just supposed to read Clausewitz not actually understand it.

The drinking caused by the reading tends to interfere with the understanding.

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

#318

Post by nostrademons »

brabel wrote: post #294
Animats wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poland and the Baltics know they're next on Putin's list. So they're glad to help Ukraine. Better than fighting the Russians on home territory. Taiwan and Japan, though, aren't in Russia's line of fire. The cooperation with Ukraine is because Ukraine figured out how to stop Russia. Taiwan has a real threat, and if they can build defenses that mean China faces a years-long war, there probably won't be one.

Even the most optimistic Russian does not think Russia will ever get beyond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novorossiya which is not much more than Russia currently occupies. You really think they will eventually march over Ukraine on to Warsaw?? That’s as likely as the exiled Chinese government in Taiwan taking over China.

When the war started, it certainly looked like it. Russian soldiers were in Kyiv at one point:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kyiv_(2022)

It was the failure of Russian logistics and the triumph of Ukrainian logistics that beat them back.

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

#320

Post by orthoxerox »

asdff wrote: post #194
dgacmu wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia's inability to have a decisive victory against Ukraine is at odds with the idea that it has sufficient stockpiles and launch capability to reduce kiev to rubble any time it wishes. If it had that capability, it would have the capability to destroy Ukraine's defense manufacturing sector - or simply its entire manufacturing sector - which it clearly does not. It's also at odds with the evidence that Russia is la…

I guess the question becomes then why did putin start the war without sufficient buildup of missile reserves to flatten Kyiv in the first few days? And why not contract with israeli defense companies for precision missile technology? It doesn't seem like their relations are really that severed even with the whole Iran issue. One would also think China might also appreciate a client willing to battle test their precis…

Because he thought he wouldn't need to use them. He expected Ukraine to accept the inevitable and not provide meaningful resistance. He almost got away with it, too. Had the Russian army launched its missile stockpiles at Ukrainian powerplants on day 1, it would've done enough damage to overwhelm the country. However, he declared that "Ukrainians were not our enemies, only the Ukrainian leadership and specific armed nationalist groups were", so he couldn't have attacked the country's civilian infrastructure until after the citizens of Ukraine decided that Russia was their enemy.
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