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

kayo_20211030

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 The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be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.

wartywhoa23

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"?

causality0

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 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.

bad_haircut72

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.

Stevvo

A 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

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.

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.

hunmernop

So many armchair quarterbacks

thrownawaysz

>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

mcswell

I 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?

red_admiral

I 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.

yborg

I 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.

neocodesoftware

What’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

“ 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.

lenerdenator

The 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.

briandw

These 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.

bix6

Does 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

China 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.

w10-1

If 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.

skywhopper

Not 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.