War Logistics in a Globalized Economy
A butterfly flaps its wings in China and a German arms manufacturer can't make ammunition.
Every week I highlight three newsletters that are worth your time.
If you find value in this project, do two things for me: (1) Hit the Like button, and (2) Share this with someone.
Most of what we do in Bulwark+ is only for our members, but this email will always be free for everyone.
1. CDR Salamander
Amateur warriors deal in tactics. Professional soldiers deal in logistics. This newsletter, run by a retired Navy guy deals heavily in logistics and is looking at an under-appreciated question in Ukraine:
There has been discussions about both sides of the war burning through their stockpiles at unsustainable rates while the war seems to be expanding. . . .
The Ukrainians would have run out of weapons and ammunition months ago if the former Warsaw Pact nations in NATO didn't empty what inventory they had left of Soviet Era weaponry and the rest of NATO led by the USA didn't wander the world trying to soak up as much available inventory money could buy. That and the rapid adoption of NATO compatible equipment by the Ukrainians is helping, but that has revealed other problems - who says the West has enough to give?
Salamander goes on to discuss recent open-source reports which demonstrate how complicated supply questions are in a globalized economy.
Russia invades Ukraine. Ukraine needs weapons. America sends weapons. Europe is trying to manufacture weapons. But the Germans need cotton linters (an unsexy component needed for propelling charges) and this cotton comes primarily from China. Which is trying to prop up Russia.
You see the problem, no? Here’s more Salamander:
The Russo-Ukrainian War is sending a clear warning to everyone - you need to ramp up production, capacity, and have a more reliable - if not efficient - supply chain.
This is hard, because unlike sexy things displacing water and making shadows on ramps, ammunition and expendables are hidden away in bunkers out of sight ... and if your peacetime military and diplomats do their job, will never be used. However, when you need them, the need is existential.
The problem with using resources “efficiently” at the level of geostrategy is that you’re involved in a game in which the goal is to have the military resources be “wasted” by not needing to be employed.
Read the whole thing and subscribe.
The United States has used up 13 years worth of Stinger production and 5 years worth of Javelin production in just 10 months of war in Ukraine.
2. Slack Tide
Matt Labash was interviewed in his newsletter, Slack Tide, and he had this to say about writing:
Q: As a fan of your writing, I'm hoping that you could clue me into the way you style your prose because it reminds me heavily of Tom Wolfe. His writing is the closest to comprising a mosaic of the world since it has multiple POVs competing to be the reliable narrator, and intense attention to detail in reconstructing scenes and lampooning materialistic life choices as seen in Radical Chic. If someone asked how anyone could write like you, what would your advice be?
LABASH: Well thank you kindly, but my advice would be not to. I mean, I too, love Tom Wolfe, don’t get me wrong. I’ve read just about every word he’s written and probably wanted to be him when I was 22, minus the ice-cream-man suit and spats. His attention to the telling detail was second to no one’s, and he was a prose pyrotechnician, besides. The dude could write about grass growing and make it interesting. And he had great story sense – as in what made one. But after you read those journalism collections of his, which are all wonderful, and you decide you want to be Tom Wolfe, and start laying it down, you realize how utterly futile it is to imitate him. Because there is and could only ever be one Tom Wolfe, and he died in 2018 (with his spats on, I’m guessing). I can’t pull off onomatopoeia and multiple exclamation points, and wouldn’t want to. Not that that was the meat of his writing – just some of the distracting accents. Kind of like drugs were for Hunter Thompson, whose most interesting writing often had nothing to do with drugs. In fact, drugs were maybe the most boring part, save some chunks of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
But my larger point is that you ultimately have to sound like yourself, or it’s not worth doing. If your voice is worth hearing, write in it. Fully inhabit it. If it’s not worth hearing, then get out of the business and find something more stable to do like BASE jumping or child soldiering, since journalism is in a perpetual state of collapse anyway. Especially the written version of it. But you can’t build a real writing life on imitation. It’ll never work. It might be useful to have good people to steal from when you first get started, just to find your rhythm. But ultimately, you have to find your own rhythm. If you don’t, you’ll be found out as a fraud, and it won’t be very satisfying anyway, to be voicing someone else’s thoughts or mannerisms.
Incidentally, while we’re talking Wolfe – and I wrote this up a few months ago in a piece I did on writing on my site – but I met him once, long ago in my twenties. We were at the same dinner – he was the guest of honor, I, then as now, was just a mope. I promised myself I wouldn’t slobber all over the poor guy if I met him. Wouldn’t want to mess up his suit. But I was pretty deep in my cups once I encountered him. And it just came out, almost involuntarily: “Mr. Wolfe, I need you to know, whenever I have trouble getting it up, writing-wise, I just read something you wrote like ‘The Last American Hero,’ your story about {the stock-car racer/moonshiner} Junior Johnson, and it’s like an adrenaline shot to the ‘nads.” I embarrassed myself. And him, I’m sure. But he was his usual courtly Virginia-gentleman self, and generously offered: “You know, I do the same thing when I’m in that spot. But I read Henry Miller.” I liked that answer a lot, as Henry Miller is a pretty good adrenaline shot, too.
Here’s another entry from Labash On Writing:
Writing is as vast as life itself. It presents infinite choices, and nearly all of them must be decided on a case-by-case basis. Because of such complexity, many try to bury themselves in simplistic books on writing, like Strunk & White’s classic, The Elements of Style. I own it. It’s around here somewhere. But it’s a book I only reach for if I’m all out of fatwood and need more kindling.
I like E.B. White otherwise. I’m not a savage. (His essay “Once More To The Lake,” collected in One Man’s Meat, is one of my all-time favorite essays on aging.) And he and his partner-in-crime’s dictatorial little instruction book is good, I suppose, for stamping the basics into beginners’ heads. You should know the rules before breaking them. Otherwise, I find it oppressive, prim, and fussy: “Make the paragraph the unit of composition: one paragraph to each topic.”
Yeah, whatever.
That said, Labash does have some practical advice:
Read more than you write. I once had a sickeningly prolific friend say that he now writes more than he reads. This made me never want to read him again. It’s your duty, as a writer – any kind of writer – to always keep filling your tank. And you can’t just do that by huffing your own fumes. You have to always be on the hunt for things that inspire, that amuse, that somehow open up the world to your readers.
If you haven’t, go subscribe to Labash. Make it your Festivus present to yourself. You’ll thank me.
One last thing: I worked with Labash for about 20 years at the same magazine. I learned how to write, in large part, by sitting in the corner and watching him; reading him.
And yet, in all those years together I don’t know that we ever talked about writing. I say this to underscore what a gift his newsletter is to anyone who values the written word. He shares the kind of real intimacy that any writer would hope to have with a talent like his.
3. Prefaces
Matt Dinan has a newsletter about writing and teaching:
A few years ago I started joking that university teaching is not difficult, and can be easily accomplished in two steps:
(1) read book
(2) talk about book
At a certain level of abstraction this joke describes how I actually do teach. . . .
My own little act of protest in coming back to teaching after the pandemic and sabbatical was thus to teach a course on a single book: Plato’s Republic. We’ve struggled to place the Republic in our Great Books Program in recent years: it’s not the best introduction to Plato on account of its length and difficulty, so we’ve moved away from teaching it to our first-years. During the pandemic we decided to keep our readings a little bit shorter to accommodate online instruction, and our students’ generalized misery. But this led to an entire cohort about to graduate from our Great Books program who have not read what is surely, if anything is, a very great book indeed. . . .
The experience of reading the Republic is, it seems to me, a synecdoche for education. Its education is not, in other words, either of the educations it depicts, but an education in learning to love images of wholeness while retaining the ability to see them as images. Glaucon is the ideal interlocutor for the dialogue because his love of abstract simplicity leads him to want to know the secrets hiding within our souls—he has no patience for images. The single book course, especially about the Republic, is something sort of elemental because it is an attempt to embody the process of education itself.
It’s a lovely essay. If you’re into books and teaching, you should subscribe.
If you find this newsletter valuable, please hit the like button and share it with a friend. And if you want to get the Newsletter of Newsletters every week, sign up below. It’s free.
But if you’d like to get everything from Bulwark+ and be part of the conversation, too, you can do the paid version.
Logistics, specifically Russian artillery shell production and inventory, could lead to an unlikely but plausible scenario in which Ukraine wins the war sooner than expected.
Per the article linked below, Russia is firing 20,000 shells per day compared to Ukraine's 4000-7000. At first, Russia used their vastly greater volume of artillery fire to drive the Ukrainians back, but now that Ukraine has more accurate and longer-ranged NATO artillery, Russia needs the 3-to-1 ratio to stay even.
A few different Twitter accounts have posted pictures that suggest Russia might be running low on shells. Apparently, armies try to use the oldest shells first. There are photos circulating on the internet of cases of Russian shells with date stamps on them from a few months ago. This suggests that Russia is out of Soviet-era shells and is relying on recently produced ones.
If Russia has shot through their old inventory (or at least all of it that's still useable), it's unlikely that they will be able to produce enough shells on their own to sustain their 20K per day output (600K per month, 7.2 MILLION per year!!).
Defense analysts I've read think that Russia can produce somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 million shells per year. So if they rely only on new production, they would have to cut their firing rate by 50 to 80 percent. Russia could buy shells from other countries, but I doubt any country or even group of countries has the capacity to produce over seven million shells a year in the modern era.
If Russia has to cut back drastically on its artillery shell expenditure soon, it will eliminate their ability to conduct offensives and greatly weaken their ability to defend their positions as well. Ukraine could then begin making more rapid progress.
Article with shell counts: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/russia-ukraine-war-ammo-rcna56210
JVL as usual has brought up an important fact no one has addressed in all the happy talk about Ukraine's military success.
When Ukraine and NATO run out of smart munitions Putin will still have millions of human cannon fodder units. A million casualties mean nothing to him. He has a fifth colunn in America that now controls the judiciary and one house of Congress. It is in their power to cause a US debt default and/or other disasters-- leading to recapture of the White House, a depression, and/.or sufficient other chaos to eliminate America as an effective supporter of the Ukrainians.
When the Ukrainians are out of the weaponry they need to counter the Russian advantage in sheer numbers, and the West has abandoned them, then it's just a matter of Putin and his regime holding on.