War Logistics in a Globalized Economy
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.
JVL thanks for continuing the triad during the holiday! But of course you all should take a break, you deserve it.
Hopefully I don't sound too communist... but globallism is driven by capitalism. My Trumpy friend lamented the lack of baby formula during the pandemic and of course blamed the left and Biden - basically feeling and saying that THE LEFT in charge destroys access to basic necessities, when that should be a basic thing that the government does for the country. I did not have the heart to tell her that the party of patriotism stop talking about buying American a LONG time ago.
Before my body gave up on me, I worked in automotive then aerospace for many years. The auto industry contorted itself terribly to try and hang on to the "American made" label, and the government was A ok with it. If a Japanese supplier opened an office in America, all of a sudden all those assemblies that came from Japanese labor were "American made" and the box labeling sported the name of the new subsidiary that was only an office here, ex. Yazaki America. Later they gave up the pretense and the industry shifted to saying "US automakers" without discussing where parts were made. The public saw a big shift in auto dealers - a popular one in the Cleveland area used to advertise "American, and Proouud of it!" That guy now peddles Kias along with Chevy.
It is similar in aerospace, a constant drive to get lower priced parts no matter where they come from, with divisions even measured and rewarded for increased foreign supply chains. For US military, the push is always for lower price, and also a push to simplify acquisition in order to reduce government spending. (Sourcing parts and their engineering drives the cost way up.) To this end, even for defense products, the government bends backwards to create ways we can source internationally, including the sharing of technical data and any Military Specifications (materials, strength, tolerances, etc) needed to create the parts. They also now allow the sale of miltitary aircraft to "partner" countries. Not only do potential future "enemies" have the aircraft in hand to replicate, but it is made much easier because maintaining aircraft requires a full system of documentation for repair and replacement of parts.
This is all driven by capitalism. That is why we needed to bring some chip mfgs up to speed with gov money. China and Japan are more advanced in the ways they manage labor (I assume also with managing engineering and development) than we are. Removal of waste and mastery of work instructions is a big deal all the time, from the time a worker is hired or from the time a new mfg plant is built. We just don't have the same focus. So over time, American suppliers simply cannot compete on cost, and this is one reason American mfg jobs don't pay workers well, it is the one of the 2 obvious cost cutting targets of head count and wage. Obvious because it is easier to see these costs that add most of the value to a product. It is much harder to assess all the salaried overheads (that is one reason that Musk at Twitter just started with a big labor cut - it makes it much easier to see what departments & functions are critical to the business, and which are "fattier.")
Sorry for the long post. My point was that if we want a robust supply chain, we need to invest domestically and evaluate all the ways we make a workforce strong. And capitalism does not incentivize companies to do this. Those US chip makers are going to require government subsidies to compete with China forever, or until we make changes.
Thanks for your response. Since I have no idea who you are or what your experience with Salamander, I'll reserve any judgment. Also, I feel strongly that Bulwark folks would not be likely to to recommend a post that was overtly anti- AV.
But, I could be wrong. Time will tell