The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
mwi.westpoint.edu
mwi.westpoint.edu
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 The outdated concept of the tooth-to-tail ratio, which implies the logistical tail is a bureaucratic waste that must be minimized to support the combat teeth, must be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.
It is not a top-down decision, production and supply as other armies use for their weapons logistics.
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 paper doesn't mention Ukraine at all, yet it's all about the kind of war that Ukraine is fighting.
[1] https://dset.tw/en/research/000491-2/
[2] https://www.technology.org/2026/03/17/japan-might-sell-weapo...
Poland is, of course, geopolitically positioned in a way that requires at least regional power status to survive if not thrive. A power vacuum in Poland is bad news for the security of Europe and Poland's immediate neighbors and regional partners as well.
As a result, an important component of long term Polish grand strategy has been the quiet building up of its logistical prowess and might and its supply chains for years. Current big names: the CPK/Port Polska megaproject which is designed with civilian/military dual use in mind; Euroterminal Sławków; expansion of the Port of Gdańsk and other ports. Regional projects include the Via Carpathia and the Via Baltica.
It could be a naval blockade until Taiwan runs out of food/fuel/medicines and they surrender. Or it could be "we will take the island no matter what" and if somebody survives OK, if not, also OK.
China controls much of the integration and many of the low level components for super low cost electronics and motors. They aren't the ones controlling all the fabs for the circuits and integration can be done anywhere if you want to pay extra.
> most manufacturers of everything within Ukraine remain dependent on imported machining tools — traditionally Chinese, but increasingly Indian and, for those who can afford it, European.
But for the cheapest components, simple base-line products like transistors, circuit boards, wiring, or solar cells, nobody can yet step up to the scale of China’s mass production.
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"
In an engagement with China it is likely that both sides would be able to strike each other's defense industrial base, with the added "benefit" that American missiles, aircraft, and other equipment are stationed strategically in the region in various countries (Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, and others) and as such the United States can project some amount of destruction on critical Chinese industrial facilities. I'm wondering if China in this scenario would be eager to, or hesitant to strike the United States for fear of a very rapid escalation of the war. Anyway - the point is that long range missiles, drones, and other offensive capabilities mean that supposedly "safe" manufacturing facilities are in danger, with the United States being a bit closer in range to inflict damage than China and with China having I would guess a little bit of hesitancy to strike mainland America.
In addition to some of the simple geographic differences, China has its own strategic challenges. Energy, for one. So far nobody has built a tank, plane, or ship that can run on batteries and while drone technology has continued to advance in many critical ways they don't bring the big bombs quite yet. Naturally the United States in the event of a war is going to at least consider if not outright strike Chinese energy facilities, and deny imports of oil which are critical to supply chains and conducting a war.
If China's only theater is perhaps Taiwan that's probably less of an issue, but then you've got the United States with its, in my view, inferior supply chain, operating unfettered, similar to during World War II while the Chinese supply chain both local and superior particularly for small or "low cost" components is facing both energy stress and stress from missiles or other attacks.
I don't mean to sound pro-USA here or to suggest there aren't other significant advantages or disadvantages for either the United States or China, but to just highlight that your thoughtful comment here which seems to imply that China's massive industrial capacity is akin to the United States' during World War II is not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
Not wrong, but the British were outproducing the Germans in many things (e.g., aircraft[1]) even before lend-lease was a thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_producti...
The Nazis were really bad at running the economy:
Even then, a custom supply chain can be set up domestically. You'll probably have to limit the number of variations for these servos and motors, but you can produce them even manually if you absolutely have to.
> The allocation changes regularly, but as of June 2025, Business Insider reported that destroying a tank was worth eight points. A multiple launch rocket system counted for 10. Killing a regular Russian soldier earned 12 points. Wounding a drone pilot was valued at 15 and eliminating him netted 25. In the final step, the payoff, units use the points they’ve earned to purchase equipment—drones, drone jamming devices, ammunition, and other goods—on Brave1 Market, an online shopping platform not unlike Amazon.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarjacoby/2025/09/19/kyivs-e-...
Is this much difference from a combat mission being written up and soldiers being promoted/awarded medals.
The point of this is to see who is successful and what drones/weapons are the most effective. With a limited budget and much larger enemy it comes down to kills per dollar.
However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.
For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.
More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.
Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]
The key thing is to have second sources for everything. Something the US military seems to have forgotten, or decided to ignore in their pursuit of gold-plated weapons systems that give the most kick-backs.
[1] https://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/vtproximityfuze.htm
The asymmetric warfare that has been enabled by inexpensive drone tech has so many vast implications that I'm not even sure we've seen every possible avenue this could explore. If either side isn't willing to completely obliterate civilian manufacturing centers, it enables long-term protracted warfare without an obvious end.
On the other hand, even obliterating civilian areas might not be an "end game" in its own right if external interests were to keep flooding the front lines with drones. FPV capabilities make conventional guidance systems a little less important, and while fiber has its weaknesses and wireless systems can be jammed, the psychological aspect of never quite knowing when a drone could be waiting in the midst of one's unit is deeply unsettling.
On the other hand, if they just want to kill you for the sake of killing you, that's another story and the enemy will probably resort to "carpet bombing".
I would say it's closer for Ukraine, which has implemented forced conscription, which is pretty far down the path to a total war. There are of course tactics and strategies they have not enacted, that's not obvious which of those would be beneficial to the war effort in a non obvious way. All wars but specially modern Wars have to balance the possibility of publicity blowback or the population giving up the will to fight
I think that’s an apt comparison because it was hard to keep an army fed (https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-...)
Current SecDef thinks looking like a war movie hero is more important, however, so action on this front may be delayed.
The US has a tradition of large, supposedly secure bases in the rear. The USAF has relied on this since WWII. It's not working any more. Iran has been hitting US air bases. In the last day, they've hit US bases in Qatar, Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain. That's just this round. There were previous hits a few months back. It's not publicized much, but it's no secret. It's hard to protect an air base against drones. Air bases are big, everyone knows where they are, airplanes are hard to hide from drones, and are vulnerable to small explosive charges. As Russia keeps finding out as Ukraine hits their air bases. There have been hits well inside Russia. Blast-resistant hangars in Crimea have been attacked. Don't leave a door open.
China is going in for airbase hardening in a big way.[1] This is sometimes called a "concrete sky" program. The USAF is way behind in the Pacific. Too many planes parked out in the open, or in weak hangars.
Active defenses against drones and missiles do work, but they just thin them out. Some get through. If the attacker has enough manufacturing capacity, the defenses can be overwhelmed. Ukraine is currently building about 7 million drones a year.
[1] https://www.hudson.org/arms-control-nonproliferation/concret...
I guess we're all guerrilla fighters now.
I mean, if minefields are okay with the intention to kill anything that walks in the area, why not drones?
I agree, or at least it feels insightful and right, though I can’t personally validate if it’s correct. But the big question I have is who is this written for, and what do they want to see happen? Is this to sway the public, to push politicians, to convince the Army internally to plan better, stop using contractors & no-bid contracts, or simply ask for more?
Looks like military spending is currently ~20% of all Federal Revenue at somewhere close to $1T, and it exceeds the combined spending of China and Russia by maybe 2x. Are we wanting to go back to 1960’s 50% of Federal Revenue? Why don’t we have reasonable logistics and supply lines and infrastructure with $1T?
Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
It's at wespoint.edu. The US military has a long and proud history of really good thinkers writing insightful and important pieces the government then ignores. My outsider impression has always been there was a freedom of ideas there. Don't get used to it though as Pete Hesgeth is fixing it fast as he can.
A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
The fact that the US wastes a lot of money on what’s likely a very ineffective military is not a surprise, surely. Yes, they should have a better logistics system for all that money.
Deeply entrenched corruption, obviously.
I guess ukraine doesn't want to be slapped equally hard. We see this in the iran war too. Small scale, targeted attacks to some cherry pieces of infrastructure to make headlines and perhaps bring people to the negotiating table, while all the power and capability is there to wipe Iran back to the stone age if so inclined.
I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
example: "CAR’s analysis, based on physical examinations of marks on the remnants, shows that the missile that struck Okhmatdyt hospital was produced at most three months before the attack. Or perhaps even eight days before. " [1]
Sanctions and limited parts availability are limiting Russia's ability to manufacture weapons [2]
[1] https://global.espreso.tv/russia-ukraine-war-car-researchers...
[2] https://www.kcl.ac.uk/warstudies/assets/kcl-fasi-paper31-win...
If Ukraine's defense didnt shoot down >90% of them depending on the type it would be a total carnage, day after day.
Of couse its largely useless wave of terror, very similar to V1/V2 terror attacks nazi germany did on London, with similar results - increasing resolve. But infrastructure is hammered, during winter it can be brutal, and country cannot go on like that forever.
Ukraine, well they don't have nukes but as I understand it, much of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was built in Ukraine. I suspect Ukraine could respond tit for tat.
But it would and always has been the last resort. If Russia feels like they have no choice left, they might do it.
But also, at the start of the war they used it as a deterrent, promising to use them if e.g. Ukraine were to strike across the border. That ended up being a false threat in the end, but you can see how Ukraine only slowly and carefully started becoming more and more bold with going across the border. All bets are off now though, with long range drones being used to target the very vulnerable refineries and oil industry. If they take out the power industry as well, and given time, it'll collapse Russia's military logistics network and isolate the front lines from supplies.
The stated Russian military goals are the "liberation" of the Donbass region and to enforce Ukraine's neutrality (i.e prevent it from joining any military alliance inimical to Russia). With the second goal, there is also the hope that future Ukrainian governments may not be as hostile to Russia as the current Ukrainian leaders and future Ukraine-Russia relations may be normalised as it was in the pre-Zelensky era. Deliberately targeting civilians, with a genocide in mind, makes that highly unlikely.
Note that for the Israeli-right, genocide is the goal because their zionist ideology is based on the settler-coloniser philosophy, and the population of the Palestinian muslims currently outnumber the Israeli Jews (when you include Palestinians that are refugees too, who have a "right to return"). The Palestinians also have a higher birth rate than the Israelis. This is a huge obstacle to the one-state solution - even the Israeli moderates on either political spectrum fear to make Palestinians Israeli citizens (which is one way of ending the conflict) as they fear Israeli Jews would then become a minority. The Israeli-right's solution to this is to make the Palestinian muslims a minority in their own land. (Akin to what the settler-coloniser Europeans did in Canada, USA, Australia etc. with the native population - this is corroborated by a UN probe that says Palestinian children and Babies were ‘special targets’ of Israeli killings - https://www.rt.com/india/642399-israel-gaza-babies-targets/ ). Moreover, as the Israeli-right are mostly religious fundamentalists and have already amended the law declaring Israel to be a Jewish state, they are also resolutely opposed to making Israel a secular state. Thus, in their political vision of Israel, only Jews can ever be a first-class citizen, while non-Jews are always meant to have lesser political rights.
> I think there are complex factors at play that prevent an actual total annihilation attack on the tail, even though it seems like it should be well within capabilities.
It's not about military capabilities but the political repercussions. NATO cannot supply enough weapons to Ukraine till they shift to a war-time mode. Moreover, they cannot allow Ukraine to use their territory to attack Russia, which is needed for successfully executing such an operation. (They have been "experimenting" in this area by ignoring Ukraine's drone intrusions into their airspace, as the drones move towards Russian assets). And you also have to ensure that you don't push the Russians into a corner as they are a nuclear weapon state.
With Iran, it is true that the Americans do have the capabilities to launch such an attack successfully. However, American allies - Iran's neighbours - fear that they will be caught in between the attack and bear the brunt of Iran's retaliatory attacks, specifically on their industry (oil and gas).
Thus, in both cases, it is mostly politics that holds them back.
For me, the most interesting bit of the article is this tid-bit:
> To survive in contested environments, the Army must transition from a centralized hub-and-spoke sustainment model to a decentralized network of smaller, dispersed, mobile, and signature-managed nodes. Sustainment elements must be capable of relocating with the same frequency as maneuver battalion tactical operations centers, while distributed caching of fuel, water, and ammunition across concealed locations should replace the current reliance on large, centralized supply dumps. This transformation must be paired with deliberate investment in camouflage, concealment, and deception tailored to sustainment operations.
That sounds very much like how the current Iranian military and para-military organisations are with their underground bunkers, warehouses and tunnels, with the ability to make independent command decisions in the absence of orders from central command. Even Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, is somewhat modelled similarly and that is why Israel's attack on Hezbollah's leadership (the pager bombing) hasn't had the impact that the Israelis hoped for - they are still bogged down fighting them in Lebanon.
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.
To make certain people money by shorting the oil market. There is a reason why these "peace" deals are always announced on Fridays.
What's the goal?! The US/Iran war has a ton of goals! Every day a new goal, each as improbable as the last.
I'm just a layman, but the goal seems obvious to me. First it's not US/Iran but US + Israel / Iran. From Israel's point of view, I assume the goal is the preemptive destruction of Iran's military capabilities (especially nuclear weapons).
The initial US goals clearly were: 1. Regime change 2. Denial is of nuclear weapons
It’s also clear these goals were not achieved. So the US changed tactics and goals. (Same as Russia no longer plans on capturing Kiev it seems)
Most likely the US is stalling for time due to oil markets and has the same intentions as before, limited only by current capability.
It varies. Which is the problem.
I can think of a few:
1) Severely kneecap the Iranians' nuclear ambitions. This one might actually be working to an extent.
2) Severely kneecap the Iranians' military ambitions in the Middle East as a whole, particularly with respect to Israel. This remains unknown. Their neighbors seem content to give them a pass for launching missiles into their infrastructure, possibly on the grounds of shared religion. Maybe they'll get tired of it.
3) Cause regime change in Iran. Not happening now. Might not happen in the foreseeable future.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/08/business/iran-oil-trump-strai...
kneecaping china by cutting off a huge source of its oil imports. Russia will not be able to make up the difference.
Or at least the Donbas... I can't imagine they'd want a border pressing up against nato without a rump state in between.
No, it has a goal to keep Putin in power.
The Iran war happened to move people's interest from a certain set of files about a certain group people onto something else.
It succeeded by that standard, but now has created the mess that you can't just start a war with a country to distract your voters and not suffer any consequences from it.
Iran was not thrilled to be bombed to play a part in this distraction.
islamic iran with nukes makes israel untennable and the us puppets in the gulf too
the us will be forced to physically invade now that the first strike failed
the us in its current form will not tolerate an existential threat to israel
Distract from the Epstein files. If you think anything else you:
1 - Haven't been paying attention since 2008.
2 - Are giving the administration way too much undeserved credit.Distraction from Epstien Files
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/iran-war-live-us-says-iranian-...
How could that be? Are they getting an influx of $300 billion dollars or something?
By contrast, Iran’s only allies are its terrorist affiliates in Lebanon, Gaza, and the Houthis. Those guys can’t do much to help. China and Russia (see above though) are willing to do business with them but don’t really give a crap about Iran surviving.
Anyway, the US and Israel can keep degrading Iran’s military and “government” by dropping bombs (or better, drones) on them every week for a decade and it won’t really be a big deal for the former. Iran though will not be better off for it, I’m pretty confident. (Other than their surviving religious fanatics will be even more suicidally devout.)
US involvement in the Middle East has ruined those countries. It is not a just middle east where ever they involve they ruin others ex: Trump's Congo deal which locked in their mineral for decade without any benefit to poor Congos
Oil futures don't currently reflect this because a lot of players have exited the market because they're sick of being fleeced by Donald Trump who has bet big and then announced yet another fake ceasefire, at least a dozen times. We actually have a bunch of short positions, such that we risk a Gamestop like short squeeze.
Ukraine is harder to figure out because it's really difficult to get good information. We have people on one side saying Russia is on the verge of collapse (and has been for 3 years) while it's also clear that Russia still has a manpower advantage and Ukraine's army is facing desertion and a lack of soldiers to draft. It's also unclear what the real impact of strikes on oil infrastructure deep in Russia are really changing the battle lines and overall position. If anything it might just exacerbate the energy crisis brought on by the Iran war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichimeca_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001–2021)
You’d be pretty hard pressed to refer the victor of any of these wars as having “superior industrial capacity” compared to their opponents.
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII. Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate. Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit. The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues. It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours. This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/putin-cant-fix-this-the-...
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP (as mush as 50%, see wiki). Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
Because it's hugely politically unpopular. There's a risk that this will happen after the parliamentary election this autumn.
In Chinese we call it "wash the ground with missiles", and many Chinese and Taiwanese say this constantly as a threat or concern. It's amusing that many people think this is a practical thing to happen, and keep bringing it up.
"We need more integrated logistics because the teeth can't fight without the tail!"
Some years pass
"Why do we have all these non-combat roles in the military? Shrink everything down and focus on warfighting!"
More years pass
"Why can't we do any support internally? We need stronger and more integrated logistics!"
Lather, rinse, repeat.
What is that referring to?
Is this really a new lesson? I thought that was common knowlegede since WW2 especially with the events of the Eastern Front.
Both Russia and the US learned expensive lessons in Afghanistan fairly recently. And yet here they are engaged in conflicts in Ukraine and Iran that don't seem to go as they planned.
By contemporary lesson I assume she means similar lesson but more recent and keeping modern world/logistics in mind.
Napoleon
What he didn't anticipate was how bad the roads in Russia would be and how long the Russian army would retreat along them. You can't resupply an army that is marching on a narrow dirt road through a forest because it's blocking its own supply lines.
We're living in times where an evangelical POTUS dislikes the pope, oligarchs talk about the "antichrist", wars are started with reference to "armageddon" [1] to distract from old money power brokers such as Epstein who has esotheric Kaballah symbols on his office walls [2 @14min42sec].
The authoritarians are concluding the democratic experiment because they can't hide their heritage any longer. All hail the King.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/troops-being-told-to-prepare-...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/never-seen-video-shows-eps...
Yes, Pearl Harbor was a known vulnerability, prior to the Japanese attack. The US just wasn't ready to take airpower seriously, at that point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k5okm8/why_d...
And then that stimulates the economy further as those people all spend that money, and the government gets a bunch of bombs and fighter jets out of the deal.
I imagine Iran, Ukraine, and Russia all know about Fabian strategy.
... not sure what a linear battlefield would be
Not that I know anything in particular about this piece of military jargon, but that's my contextually-informed supposition.
I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
Getting them there seems easy, its the keeping them there that seems like a logistical nightmare.
>You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Or make friends with one of your neighbors that the USA appears to be keen on pissing off constantly. I have never seen more negative sentiment about the USA from Canadians before, who now see the USA as a strategic threat instead of their mentally challenged neighbor.
And dont get me started on Mexico, they can probably be had for pennies.
> One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky
Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.
So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
These can be launched in mass, cheaply. They're difficult to detect and/or distinguish (weather balloons are already common), and easy to cloud with dummy balloons, perhaps dangling aluminium paper to enhance radar signatures.
The drones themselves could use optical+inertial guidance, and have either minimal propulsion or be entirely glide-based. Given prevailing high-altitude winds (generally west-to-east in mid-northern latitudes) strikes could be launched many thousands of miles from targets with minimal or no fuel / propulsive storage use.
"Ukraine uses military balloons to deliver drone strikes inside Russia" <https://english.nv.ua/russian-war/ukraine-uses-military-ball...>
"Ukraine Revives Military Balloons for Modern Warfare Needs: Report" <https://thedefensepost.com/2026/02/18/ukraine-balloons-moder...>
Japan used a similar strategy, though to no strategic or tactical effect (six civilians were killed in Oregon), during WWII:'
Fu-Go balloon bomb <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb>
In 1945, a Japanese Balloon Bomb Killed Six Americans, Five of Them Children, in Oregon <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon...>
It doesn’t seem impossible that some radical group of attacks the US from within.
And that’s quite apart from the US threats to attack its neighbours.
They are not cheap.
What "reactive engine" is Zelensky talking about?
This hasn't happened yet. And much easier, more deniable attacks like car bombings of these places also hasn't happened to any real degree.
The mass shootings in the US are mostly performed by Americans, usually right-wing Americans, and the percentage performed by foreigners is close to zero. Looking forward to some right wing American replying linking to individual examples of foreigners doing mass shootings as though that disproves the point.
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.
More dangerously, I think that would inevitably lead to space being the battlefield. Since that area doesn't need any more shrapnel orbiting at 17,500 mph; it seems an idea best left to the drawing board. The cleanup required will make clearing mine fields seem like dusting the living room.
Starship's in theory targeting something like a million bucks in fuel for a launch. For a military that spends more than that on individual missiles, that's peanuts.
Near earth orbit will be a field of debris until gravity takes over.
If I were China, I'd probably be backdoor signalling that they would consider these launches to be potential nuclear strikes to try to get them off the table.
There are many options to deliver drones to a location and i dont think from orbit is the most viable one, let alone moving any production there.
The situation there is an utter joke, and shows no sign of wrapping up any time soon.
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̶F̶i̶r̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶a̶l̶.̶ ̶
̶M̶e̶g̶a̶c̶o̶n̶s̶t̶a̶l̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶L̶E̶O̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶ ̶p̶i̶p̶e̶ ̶d̶r̶e̶a̶m̶.̶ ̶
̶S̶t̶a̶r̶s̶h̶i̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶n̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ ̶f̶l̶y̶.̶ ̶
Starfall will never happen!
Ask your favorite LLM for a brief tutorial on "NATO unit symbology" and "logistics-related operational terms and graphics". The relevant publication is "MIL-STD-2525D". https://www.jcs.mil/portals/36/documents/doctrine/other_pubs...
How could a modern army replicate this? Mobile nuclear powered bioreactors that could create food? Mobile 3d printers that could consume local materials to create ammunition? An interesting thing to think about.
As for the article, when the institution that trains future generals says we have a problem then we should _listen_.
Electricity can be moved anywhere in the world instantly, if you can dig a trench and lay cables. The problem, of course, is density, some combination of (energy OR power) per (liter OR gram) depending on the application:
Batteries don't come close to the energy/power density of jet fuel, but what about whatever fuel armored vehicles use? And what about other electrical storage options, such as hydrogen fuel cells?
Some options might be uneconomical in a civilian environment where logisitics is relatively cheap but fine in a warfare environment where logisitics is far more expensive both in moving assets and in the consequences of logisitical failure.
Also, I'm assuming vehicles consume most of the fuel, but maybe there are other significant applications? And I'm assuming throughput on electrical lines is sufficient - it's fast but how much energy can you move per hour? - but that's something I've never had to think about.
In WW2 when low on fuel they would gassify combustible items and run that through the engines. The germans called it Holzgas. You could rig this up in the field. It wasnt good mind but the vehicles could move about when logistics fell through.
The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless. It would become a game of finding and destroying power cables.
> The idea of being tethered to your supply lines by a cable would probably scare logistics people witless.
I think buried electrical cables would be much more appealing than being tied to roads and trucks full of gasoline. Electrical cables are easy to lay, probably by uncrewed ground or even air vehicles, and could be done quickly with optimization. Redundancy would be cheap and easy, creating a network with few single points of failure. And keeping some generators close to the front, you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
They played this game with communications cables in WW2.
https://www.infoage.org/history-ia/world-war-ii-radar/wire-a...
https://www.keymilitary.com/article/laying-lines
Have a look at the "Buck Eye"
You would need to dig them pretty deep, likely under barrage. And then when the artillery finds them again, back out you go.
>you can also ship them liquid fuel if needed.
This would likely be the ultimate solution, ICE vehicles.
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.
1. The US is second in the world, behind Ukraine, in military drone production.
2. The US is a close second to China in logistics + last mile drone production.
3. The US is still the only country with the proven ability to move mass anywhere in the world.
None of this means that the US will win a hot war against China. However, that has - always - been the case. The US fought against China in Korea and SE Asia/Vietnam and had the opportunity twice to move the conflict into Chinese territory. They didn't, for obvious reasons.
Geography + LOCs + population are a b***h.
Worth noting that, outside of WW2, the US has never really had a large merchant fleet.
"force fields" had me reading that sentence entirely wrong
A more appropriate question might be, where are the armored vehicles now in Russia?
And as it turns out, they have indeed started adding armor to transport craft, including trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_train_Yenisei
And despite Ukrainian strikes earlier, the Russian bridge over the Kerch strait remains standing and in use for some (not all) logistical supply from Russia to Crimea, and this is due in no small amount due to the amount of 'armoring' that is inherent to the design of a bridge that must cross a strait of that size.
It's a question of cost more than anything, the more expensive a transport means becomes to build, the more it makes sense to start including armor to force an attack on that transport to itself have to invest a lot more for success.
Well, that's what I meant, where are the Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine. Because I consider the areas that Russia occupies to be temporarily occupied Ukraine.
Although you (I) could ask where the armored vehicles are that the US and other countries gave to Ukraine. For awhile, Bradley Fighting Vehicles (lightly armored) and M1A1 Abrams were making a lot of news (I think the former were doing surprisingly well, and the latter not as good as expected). But lately I have heard very little about either, or about other armored vehicles that were given to Ukraine.
The strikes ukraine makes in russian territory seem like they are extremely successful but limited in quantity and scope. Why not push that envelope? Some factors must exist that prefer these attacks to be small scale headline makers vs actual large scale destruction.
https://oshkoshdefense.com/vehicles/medium-tactical-vehicles...
Most people hereabouts will be wittering on about how best to kill people/do stuff with drones and forget that logistics is rather more complicated than killing things.
Fundamentally: people need food, water and shelter. Vehicles need fuel, mechanics and stuff. Killing people and destroying stuff needs ammunition or at least something sharp (and that will need something to keep it sharp).
Then you need to coordinate all this stuff, along with comms and a lot more details that I've not mentioned.
Then you need to persuade your troops to do their medieval best on the opposition and hope it works.
I don't know how one would reach that conclusion, least of all a Major at the nation's leading military educational institute. Nothing "hell-bent" about it.
9/11 was a huge success for Bin Laden's goal of restarting a forever war, though.
And between WW1 and WW2. And just before WW1, during the Belle Époque. And probably before that, too.
The US is weirdly attached to violence and war in ways you only tend to find in modern dictatorships or the empires of old.
Edit: I will go a bit further..
I consider Military the greatest power on Earth. It's sacred, necessary. But those who abuse its power commit, in my view, the greatest of sins. I don't mean the soldiers who fight, but those making the decisions of who they fight. The soldiers do their job, often willingly. And they are the ones who face the consequences. To betray them by corruption is the ultimate betrayal. War is a power that, I think, should be reserved for situations with no other option. Mercenaries not considered.
A more open space means better ideas with potential edge get shared, which is better for everyone.
Why? Because any time junior officers just went through losing a war they are going to be pissed off that they were sent out there to do something that was impossible, and got a lot of their friends killed doing it. And if you let them, they are going to fix your military and make it more effective. My favorite example of this is the unpublished Ph.d thesis from Marshall Michel, The Revolt of the Majors (https://etd.auburn.edu/handle/10415/595) about all of the junior pilots in the US Air Force who experienced, first hand, how terrible and useless the USAF was during Vietnam and over the course of the 1970's and 1980's built the totally different US Air Force that did Desert Storm.
If you are fortunate enough that you don't have the experience of recently losing a war, there will be a smaller number of junior officers who will be worried about losing the next one, and it will take more effort to identify those officers and put them into positions of power, but it is still possible to revolutionize your military without the bitter taste of a defeat. Defeat just makes it so that there are lot more junior officers committed to reform, and they will have the upper-hand over the more senior officers- so long as they are all selected for competence and not loyalty. If promotions are selected with loyalty as the primary factor, then you don't get reform, you get patronage.
Sometimes a patronage system can be effective, but it ends up being like the Czarist Russian fleet of 1905: Admiral Makarov was very very good, and everything directly under him was competent, but all of the other admirals varied between mediocre and terrible and the rest of the fleet was as well. After Makarov's ship the Petropavlovsk sank with almost of its officers and men (including him) the Russian Navy gave no further benefit to the state, it was just a sacrifice.
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.
Stationary bases can easily be targeted globally. The United States has 11 nuclear powered aircraft carriers. We can assume any peer adversary will have knowledge of their approximate whereabouts at all times. It's unclear how they would fare in next generation conflict but we can assume USA's enemies are designing their weapons around taking those carriers down.
The Air Force is currently upgrading many of its aircraft for longer range operations to increase standoff range
First, China. 100 miles of open ocean separate mainland China and Taiwan. To invade you need to put boots on the ground. That means you also need armor. And then you need everything that goes with that. Food, medical, resupply, ammunition, a place to repair your vehicles and so on. You can't airlift this, even with air supremacy. It requires ships, a lot of ships. And that means Taiwan, the US and allies could, if they wanted to, wreak havoc with supply lines.
I've seen one estimate that it would take over a million soldiers for China to occupy Taiwan, possibly two million. China simply does not have that amphibious capability so this is a silly conversation. American politicians talks this up to give more money to weapopns manufacturers for weapon systems that are too expensive and don't work and also to propagandize the population into "China = bad". But it's not a real threat.
On a clear day from Calais you can see the white cliffs of Dover. I believe the distance at its closest point is 17 miles. Yet despite having an Army that exceeded 12 million soldiers, Germany was unable to invade Britain. This is big of a problem water was then. It hasn't changed.
Second, Iran. Iran is surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and the Persian Gulf on the 4th. There is nowhere where a US invasion could muster like they did with Kuwait (ie from Saudi Arabia). We saw the futility of this in the Iran-Iraq war, which was a complete stalemate (with over a million dead) despite an almost decade of the US supplying Saddam Hussein.
So with mountains on 3 sides, that leaves an amphibious landing. Again, the problem remains of where would troops muster? It can't be anywhere beyond the Strait of Hormuz because the Navy can't defend against drone and missile attacks at close range like that, let alone get thousands of supply ships through safely. So that leaves Pakistan or Oman. Both are in range of drone attacks. The US has essentially abandoned all Gulf bases because of the complete inability to defend them. How would the US defend a million troops and all the supplies they need, including landing craft?
Logisitcally, the operation would be as complex and large as D-Day. The US doesn't have that military anymore. The Navy has a pair of amphibious landing craft that could put 5000 Marines somewhere. Great. They'd die. For enough infantry, you'd need a draft. You'd need to build so many ships. It would take years and nobody has that kind of time.
The Joint Chiefs know this. It's why no US president has started a war with Iran despite the Israeli PM asking every one of them to do so since at least Reagan. It's only this president who took the bait of Mossad telling him how the regime would fall within days after a decapitation strike.
The entire Iranian military project is to resist the US military. Bases buried in mountains, cheap ballistic missiles and drones that can be mass-produced, a mosaic defense to avoid potential decapitation and air defenses that are seemingly good enough that the US, even with F35s, still has to stand off.
I bet you won't find a single serious military planner who thought this operation was possible.
Any thoughts on why they presented the operational plan to the President as an option then?
It'll be interesting to see how that goes in Ukraine where Russia has ~700k troops and the logistics are being cut by Hornet drones and similar.
Sadly, most wars generate both.
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.
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.
The US has been foremost among western democracies in backing dictatorships, even genocidal ones.
I can see from many of the comments here people generally have absolutely no idea what logistics management comprises. Let this be a lesson on Dunning-Kruger.
Seems like Modern War Institute is more concerned with looking posh, than getting their message across - the message of endurance. That's ironic.
This makes the page SO hard to read. Why are "designers" still doing this? Have they no respect for their readers?
I don't think I've made a similar comment elsewhere on Hacker News, reddit, etc., (nor do I plan to make a habit of it) but this one stuck out to me. I know this because I did read it just as I've read previous posts such as these on West Point through the years. This just isn't how things used to be written. It's a little more ambiguous out in the wild on any given site/blog/etc.
> The only things we increase are mistrust and frustration
Mistrust of what? The human voice behind this thought? Yes, I think that mistrust is valid and earned. Nevertheless, I admit the topic seems pertinent and the argument has merit.