Logistics

The Kinetic Chain 1 Part 1: Alexander's Invisible Army 2 Part 2: Napoleon's Fatal Calculation 3 Part 3: The Railroad Revolution 4 Part 4: The Crimean Catastrophe 5 Part 5: Barbarossa and the Battle of the Gauges 6 Part 6: The Battle of the Bulge and the Tyranny of Fuel 7 Part 7: Wholesale Distribution and the American Way of 8 Part 8: The Pacific Logistics Challenge 9 Part 9: Victory Through Logistics 10 Part 10: Vietnam and the Tyranny of Terrain 11 Part 11: Giap's Bicycle Brigades 12 Part 12: The Ho Chi Minh Trail 13 Part 13: American Largesse in Vietnam 14 Part 14: The M16 Debacle and Logistics Failure 15 Part 15: The Falklands Logistics Miracle 16 Part 16: Desert Storm and the Logistics Miracle 17 Part 17: The Future of Contested Logistics ← Series Home Key Takeaways Lead time matters: Six months of buildup before combat operations allowed logistics infrastructure to match the force. The Falklands' rushed deployment was not repeated. Modern warfare consumes more: VII Corps alone required 5 million gallons of fuel per day during the ground offensive. The scale of consumption would have staggered WWII logisticians. Host nation support is critical: Saudi infrastructure—ports, roads, airfields—made the deployment possible. Without it, the timeline would have doubled or tripled. Logistics enables maneuver: The "Left Hook" that destroyed Iraqi forces was possible because Pagonis built the supply infrastructure to support a corps-sized movement through empty desert. The Challenge On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Within days, Iraqi forces were positioned on the Saudi Arabian border, threatening the world’s largest oil reserves. ...

The Invisible Army ← Series Home Key Takeaways Sanctuary is ending: Since WWII, American logistics operated in sanctuary—ports weren't bombed, ships weren't sunk in quantity. A peer adversary will attack the supply chain directly. Dependence is vulnerability: The global supply chains that enable modern logistics also expose them. Critical components from adversary nations, single-source dependencies, long vulnerable routes. Industrial base has atrophied: America builds few ships, produces little ammunition in peacetime. Surging production for a major war would take years that may not be available. The doctrine is changing: "Contested logistics" and "expeditionary advance base operations" acknowledge that future supply will be neither safe nor guaranteed. The End of Sanctuary For eighty years—from 1945 to today—American military logistics has operated in conditions of relative sanctuary: ...

The Kinetic Chain 1 Part 1: Alexander's Invisible Army 2 Part 2: Napoleon's Fatal Calculation 3 Part 3: The Railroad Revolution 4 Part 4: The Crimean Catastrophe 5 Part 5: Barbarossa and the Battle of the Gauges 6 Part 6: The Battle of the Bulge and the Tyranny of Fuel 7 Part 7: Wholesale Distribution and the American Way of 8 Part 8: The Pacific Logistics Challenge 9 Part 9: Victory Through Logistics 10 Part 10: Vietnam and the Tyranny of Terrain 11 Part 11: Giap's Bicycle Brigades 12 Part 12: The Ho Chi Minh Trail 13 Part 13: American Largesse in Vietnam 14 Part 14: The M16 Debacle and Logistics Failure 15 Part 15: The Falklands Logistics Miracle 16 Part 16: Desert Storm and the Logistics Miracle 17 Part 17: The Future of Contested Logistics ← Series Home This final link in the series transitions from historical observation to a Forward-Looking Systemic Audit. ...

The Secret Life of Ordinary Objects ← Series Home The Box That Changed Everything: How Standardized Shipping Containers Created the Global Economy The shipping container—a simple metal box, typically 20 or 40 feet long—is perhaps the most important, and least celebrated, innovation of the 20th century. This humble rectangular prism, stacked by the thousands on ships and trucks, fundamentally restructured the global economy. ...

Key Takeaways The Logistical Wall: After the Dieppe raid proved capturing a port was impossible, Allied planners faced an insurmountable supply challenge—until they decided to bring their own harbor. Mulberry Harbours: Two floating ports, built from 10 modular components by 45,000 workers, were towed across the Channel. Mulberry B landed 2.5 million troops, 500,000 vehicles, and 4 million tonnes of supplies. Bailey Bridges: Engineers built 55 miles of prefabricated bridges in months, allowing tanks to cross destroyed river spans in hours instead of days. The Red Ball Express: An 83-day emergency truck convoy system moved 12,500 tons of supplies daily to fuel the Allied advance—staffed predominantly by African-American soldiers. The Information War: Alan Turing's Bombe machine and the cavity magnetron radar made the Channel crossings possible by defeating the U-boat threat. For centuries, military triumph has hinged on brute force and strategic genius. Yet, World War II proved that victory often belongs to the quiet revolutionaries: the engineers, the logisticians, and the scientists who fought their battles not on blood-soaked beaches but over drafting tables and in secret workshops. ...

Key Takeaways Strategic Resilience: Wood-gas generators ensure transportation continuity under oil sanctions, valuing sovereignty over efficiency. Pyrolytic Mechanism: Converts biomass into producer gas through pyrolysis, providing a fuel source immune to embargoes. Crisis Adaptation: Adopted during 1990s famine as grassroots innovation, later standardized for national survival. Ecosystem Effects: Reshapes labor allocation, vehicle design, and fosters mechanical literacy in a resource-scarce environment. Autarky Model: Demonstrates technological regression as a path to functional independence from global energy markets. --- The Anachronism That Moves a Nation On a rural North Korean road, a spectacle from a wartime documentary unfolds: a Soviet-era ZIL-130 truck, its bed stacked with timber, moves under its own power. Protruding from its front is a large, cylindrical, wood-burning furnace, connected to the engine by a web of pipes. This is not a museum piece; it is a standard piece of logistical infrastructure. This vehicle is powered by a gasogen or wood-gas generator—a pyrolytic engine. While the global automotive industry races toward electrification, North Korea maintains a fleet of perhaps hundreds of thousands of vehicles running on a technology largely abandoned by the world after 1945. This is not a quaint hobby. It is a deliberate, systemic adaptation to a permanent state of sanctioned scarcity. The wood-gas truck is more than a vehicle; it is the physical manifestation of a national survival strategy, a rolling testament to how a state can insulate itself from the pressures of the global oil market and the reach of international embargoes. ...