How difficult is logistics anyway?!

By now everybody should know the importance of logistics. So why does it seem to be so difficult for armies which field literally hundreds of armoured fighting vehicles to spend a few bucks on a few trucks? How did the Russians frick up so bad?
>corruption, incompetence, etc
Okay fine
Leaving the Russhits aside, what about the other NATO militaries? They've got this logistics thing completely solved right? Right?!

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  1. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Army trucks are so cool. Maybe I should become a soldier just to drive them. It would mean I would have to stop eating ice cream though.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      > I would have to stop eating ice cream though.
      You really don't

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        This.
        Army truck drivers are the laziest frickers I've ever seen.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Buddy of mine drove trucks during his conscription in the Austrian army, it was a really chill experience apparently.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Yeah, I have a friend in the Finnish army that is a truck driver and he doesn't do anything during the day. He basically only drives during exercises.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          Buddy of mine drove trucks during his conscription in the Austrian army, it was a really chill experience apparently.

          Yeah, I have a friend in the Finnish army that is a truck driver and he doesn't do anything during the day. He basically only drives during exercises.

          my mate's a truck driver, his squad is unironically the laziest motherfrickers in the battalion, but I think it's a good place for people who wouldn't be able to serve otherwise to be in (he has terribly flat feet)

          Ah I remember the Snack Wars. I served in the 8th Greggs Baguette Battalion.

          Ah, the Foreign Legion. Fine lads.
          I was in the 3rd Sausage Rolls.

          >You're shitting me
          Nope. Because this truck would also need a truck. And one truck cannot do more than 1 thing. It can trasport fuel or spare parts or other things like food but not all at once.

          I wouldn't have thought one truck per AFV is considered "extremely light"

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >I wouldn't have thought one truck per AFV is considered "extremely light"
            A cold-war era soviet tank company had 1 truck per 10 tanks
            This was an upgrade over WW2 where a company had no trucks at all

            A US tank company had 1 truck, 1 trailer, 1 M113, and 2 humvees for 14 tanks
            Technically fewer trucks per tanks, but overall higher mechanisation for non-tanks

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              That doesn't count logistics support, those are just organic trucks. Why didn't you instantly catch that? One truck cannot be organic hauling related equipment while supporting anything else of note because it cannot be in two places at once.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              That's for repairs and stuff. Resupply units are usually held at the division/corps-level (except for during the current brigade-centric organization) and tasked out as needed to stay ahead of expected resupply needs. It takes a pack of mad geniuses to properly maintain a corps in battle.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            Trucks are exponential in distance, not linear.
            Moving one truckload one max distance takes one truck, moving that same single truckload double max distance takes three trucks, three times the distance takes seven trucks, four times takes fifteen trucks, etc...
            And before that you have to deliver the trucks themselves, and then supply them all with repairs and men. And then the men operating the trucks also need supplies...
            Now you'll rapidly start having to deal not with trucks but roads, and by this same equation supplying three saturated road of trucks needs seven saturated roads of trucks, but in many cases there just aren't that many roads.
            And now those choked roads full of supply trucks start attracting enemy attention so you need air support, radar, armored divisions, infantry trenches, etc...
            In the end you win up in a situation where to deliver a single bag of potato a day chips across the country you need to first construct a series of highways, rail lines and seaports, then build several trade cities populated with millions of workers, open universities to train teams of engineers, build a robust commercial airline network, etc...

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >what is sealift?

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >I wouldn't have thought one truck per AFV is considered "extremely light"
            You now realize why many nations underestimate the difficulty of logistics kek.

            • 11 months ago
              Anonymous

              >one truck per AFV
              And the compounding effect: those support trucks have logistics.
              I'd love to see a tip-of-the-iceberg chart showing what it took to get one NLAW or Javelin or 155mm round to the front line.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                I imagine it's something like those charts you see for BigMacs and shit

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                Well first you need a well-developed continent-sized first world country with an economy of several trillions with massive transportation and communication networks and production facilities and an educated workforce. The rest is trivial and left as an exercise to the reader.

              • 11 months ago
                Anonymous

                see

                >logistics on a national level has to be a nightmare
                Now do it on a global scale.

                If you think about it, it takes a First World economy to do proper logistics. Right there you limit the number of entrants. And you need a top of the line army and navy and air force to do logistics over any significant distance.
                > overlap those two areas and you have a very narrow area in your venn diagram

                That's a VERY narrow population you've described:
                > well-developed
                > continent-sized
                > first world country
                > economy of several trillions
                > with massive transportation and communication networks and production facilities
                > and an educated workforce
                Number of countries that satisfy this set of criteria: 1

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      You could be driving the army ice cream barge

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >The plot of Ernest joins the army

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Son, with an attitude like that you'll be captain of the ice cream barge in no time.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Buy one. You can buy old Bundeswehr trucks or completely new ones

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Wait, i can play Snowrunner irl?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        You don't get to blaze your own trail. You go where the engineers have cleared you to go.

  2. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >They've got this logistics thing completely solved right? Right?!
    solved is an overstatement, even the mighty USA with its airdroppable burger kings is still going to suffer shortages on the frontlines

    but part of the reason the US can send 2000 armored vehicles to iraq and supply them is because they are so much better at it than anyone else

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >they are so much better at it than anyone else
      Yeah but why??

      Everybody should be well aware that to operate X number of battalions they need Y tons of bullets and Z barrels of fuel and so on, and all the trucks and stuff to get them where they need to go

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        That's the fundamental question everyone's been working on in regards to logistics.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        You have to plan logistics in advance. It takes years and tens/hundreds of billions to build and train an effective logistics force that can deal with the many different kinds of adversity that they might face in a campaign, and billions a year to keep it in shape.

        The US manages it because 1) it has no choice (almost all combat has been overseas at the end of a supply line stretching thousands of miles), and 2) it's willing to spend the absurd amounts of money developing logistics capabilities.

        Hence, the large number of cargo ships and boats. Hence, the massive cargo plane fleet (backed by the CRAF). Look at the sheer number of support and sustainment units in the org charts--for example, the 2030 re-org lists 1 support battalion per brigade, PLUS a support brigade for each division. Plus Corps-level support.

        In contrast, look at the Wehrmacht: all of the focus was placed on tactical and operational-level maneuvering, with logistics constantly being left as an afterthought. The sad truth is that everybody other than the US (and the UK, back when it had a globe-spanning empire) simply doesn't seem to grok how vital it is.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >everybody other than the US (and the UK, back when it had a globe-spanning empire) simply doesn't seem to grok how vital it is
          surely they should know
          I'm mindblown

          >So why does it seem to be so difficult for armies which field literally hundreds of armoured fighting vehicles to spend a few bucks on a few trucks?

          I'ts not a few trucks, it is a highly complex and very large Leontief function, for which calculating the coefficients is extremely complicated.

          Ex: If you want to transport a truckload of goods for 300 km, you will need more than one truck. Because the trucks need fuel and spares and the crew need food, shelter, replacements, etc. All that stuff comes on trucks.. You get the problem.

          The french Serval brigade had roughly one truck per non truck vehicle and that would be considered extremely light logistics. For conventional forces that include tracked vehicles, thats substantially more trucks. All those have to be bought, crewed, serviced and supplied, which is ridicolously expensive.

          Mostly budget, industrial base and manpower.

          >one truck per non truck vehicle and that would be considered extremely light logistics
          You're shitting me

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >You're shitting me
            Nope. Because this truck would also need a truck. And one truck cannot do more than 1 thing. It can trasport fuel or spare parts or other things like food but not all at once.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        one of the most common issues people bump into is that they miscalculated things based on assumptions about what they could do
        ie. they think they can do X because they have A,B,C available but in reality once they put it into action they often only have A and B, because C experienced unforseen issues

        >troops starving in stalingrad
        >mein fuhrer, we can not hold out
        >goering advises hitler that the luftwaffe can totally provide the X000 tons a day required because we calculated that we have this many cargo planes available
        >except that they forgot to take into account that a third of their HE-111 were deadlined at a time due to repair or maintenance
        >Do-17s had a lower cargo capacity than HE-111s and couldnt make up the shortfall
        >a lot of flights cancelled due to bad weather
        >a lot of flights delayed when flying at night
        >a lot of planes shot down due to soviet AA
        >end up only delivering half the calculated the daily required quota

        its been said that desert storm was only possible due to microsoft spreadsheet, allowing an unprecedented efficiency and accuracy in calculating their projected supply consumption and supply capability

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          People laugh at Soviet bureaucracy, but the real bureaucracy is American, because it's actually robust and not totally designed for corruption.

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            >reply to someone’s effortpost with entirely unrelated diatribe
            >.

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          minor correction, it was the JU-52s that they were counting on to resupply the sixth army
          and it was the HE-111s that they brought in as replacements when they found out the JU-52 had been severely overestimated

          • 11 months ago
            Anonymous

            It didn't help that the Germans seemed to treat those cargo aircraft were expendable. They were slaughtered over Stalingrad and this was after taking a beating in Africa as well as the other pocket in the east (I forget which one exactly), they also suffered in Crete earlier in the war.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >So why does it seem to be so difficult for armies which field literally hundreds of armoured fighting vehicles to spend a few bucks on a few trucks?

        I'ts not a few trucks, it is a highly complex and very large Leontief function, for which calculating the coefficients is extremely complicated.

        Ex: If you want to transport a truckload of goods for 300 km, you will need more than one truck. Because the trucks need fuel and spares and the crew need food, shelter, replacements, etc. All that stuff comes on trucks.. You get the problem.

        The french Serval brigade had roughly one truck per non truck vehicle and that would be considered extremely light logistics. For conventional forces that include tracked vehicles, thats substantially more trucks. All those have to be bought, crewed, serviced and supplied, which is ridicolously expensive.

        Mostly budget, industrial base and manpower.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        its insanely complex, but one thing is that the entire US Army runs on one fuel: JP-8. It sounds like a small thing, but then you go look at other nations where you can't use half of your fueling trucks for half of your combat vehicles because some run on gasoline, others on diesel and so forth.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        The US has a large enough GDP to support a large enough military that employs enough people and purchases enough machines based on their ambitions.
        Most countries that get into trouble with logistics tend to be dictatorships with ambitions far beyond their means, and with no one who can meaningfully tell them "no, we can't afford an invasion".

  3. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Oshkosh has been making some /k/ino logistics vehicles. The US logistics vehicles are slowly being upgraded to include some armored capability.
    Most countries don’t have the navy to ship large amounts of gear across the planet and don’t have the basing rights to stage that gear.

  4. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    When you're popping Skittles and playing games on your iPhone in a classroom, it's simple & easy as shit.

    When artillery is raining down on you and your supply line and you HAVE to keep it operational or your battlefront collapses ... gets a bit tricky.

  5. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    It's difficult enough that doing it well while not being shot at makes you Jeff Bezos

  6. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Have you ever played Factorio op?

  7. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Just read Caocao’s book you moron.
    In the various annotated versions of Art of War Caocao’s version values most. Cuz he is the only annotation author who has real experience from participating small battle, to commanding a army and then organising a war.
    In his time transposing 1 unit of grain to border would cost 20 unit en route for feeding porters and horses.

  8. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Russian logistics centres around energy movement.
    Chinese logistics is consumer goods focused.
    The US is the only power capable of expeditionary movement of force. A Chinese naval detachment operating in the Gulf of Mexico would run out of food and fuel in a few weeks. A Russian occupation of Laos wouldn’t be able to sustain AirPower.
    These aren’t controversial ideas.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >A Chinese naval detachment operating in the Gulf of Mexico would run out of food and fuel in a few weeks.
      And that is what always took me out of Mercenaries 2. Also that line about Not getting Involved in a land war with China, Except it goes in Asia and the game is set in Venezuela.

  9. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    tanks are sexy
    the work of getting the tanks in the field and keeping them in the field is not sexy and expensive

  10. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >How difficult is logistics anyway?!
    Really extremely hard. Imagine you need to call your friend 800 miles away, tell him to pick up a list of random shit from 3 different stores and meet you in the middle of nowhere so you can make a sandwich.
    Now imagine doing that with 1000 different friends making a giant sandwich. None of them have access to enough ingredients to make the whole sandwich, and not all of them have access to all ingredients or even the same stores, or even the same size cars or navigation systems.
    Now do that for a million giant sandwiches scattered across the countryside while also avoiding being blown up by the forces of anti-sandwich.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >avoiding being blown up by the forces of anti-sandwich.
      Why do they hate sandwiches so?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Like usual, it doesn't matter why, their anti-sandwich missiles will kill you either way.

        Ah I remember the Snack Wars. I served in the 8th Greggs Baguette Battalion.

        >mfw I'm just a REMF, behind the sneezeguard.
        I'm a sandwich assembly technician!

        • 11 months ago
          Anonymous

          >Like usual, it doesn't matter why, their anti-sandwich missiles will kill you either way.

          >finally get to have the tastiest BLT ever
          >laser guided firecracker blows it out of your hands
          the horror...the horror

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >Why do they hate sandwiches so?
        They worship the Blender

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Ah I remember the Snack Wars. I served in the 8th Greggs Baguette Battalion.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        To this day, I wake up with explosions and screams and the cries of ALOHA SNACKBAR ringing in my ears

  11. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >UTF
    Pure sex

  12. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    In order to be the best at logistics it helps a LOT if you can count on your homeland never being at risk during the war. If you can build as many factories as you need without covering them entirely in AA, have the workers and their families sleep at night without fear of incoming bombs, keep all your mines and farms not just alive but running overtimes. you have a bit of logistical advantage over a country that has none of that.

    All of the NATO countries are doing logistics well now. They practice generally, exchange officers and staff resources all the time, and have what they need - for peacetime. How they will work if there ever is a NATO war we don't know, but we do know that our only enemy know the address and coordinate of most of our depots, factories, barracks and strategic resources. Things are going to be pretty interesting the first weeks of war for people living near those places. Even the proud USA would get a bit angsty if some of their key roadcrosses, fuel depots and main power generators went boom all of a sudden and then logistics could get challenging for a while.

  13. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    >logistics.
    > spend a few bucks on a few trucks
    Logistics is not just throwing $$ after trucks.
    > sourcing the supplies
    > getting the supplies built
    > receiving supplies
    > getting large quantities of supplies to distribution center / warehouse
    > properly storing supplies
    > knowing what supplies need to be moved to FEBA (forward edge battle area)
    > protecting supplies
    All of this is hard. And each one is an entry point for corruption (theft, sub-standard materials) or frickery (bad storage, bad transport, bad handling).

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Indeed, logistics are not just trucks full of ammo, weapons, and people.

      Training, establishing bases, transporting essential supplies like food and water and GASOLINE (OIL), transporting and deploying large and expensive weapon systems, communications, and more, depending on the nature of the war.

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        >GASOLINE (OIL)

        WAR FOR OIL

        OIL FOR WAR

        BABYLON MARCHES

  14. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    In conventional war, logistics make the difference between victory and defeat.

    People focus on the sexy side of things, the tactics, but logistics are the life support of any war machine.

    Which is what makes unconventional war so devastating.

    Counter-insurgents must sustain a complex logistics chain.

    Insurgents are just armed, organized, and living in their country like normal. You can't even tell who is a local citizen and who is a guerilla fighter, because they dress the same. Their logistics chain is just living and working in their own country.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Insightful.

  15. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    I work at a pcr test kit producing company making millions of dollars worth of product every day and we have problems getting materials up from the basement within 24 hours. Actual logistics in a unpredictable, constantly shifting system on a national level has to be a nightmare, even if you can court marshal people for laziness and incompetence.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >logistics on a national level has to be a nightmare
      Now do it on a global scale.

      If you think about it, it takes a First World economy to do proper logistics. Right there you limit the number of entrants. And you need a top of the line army and navy and air force to do logistics over any significant distance.
      > overlap those two areas and you have a very narrow area in your venn diagram

  16. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Anyone who has served in the US military overseas will tell you how close to collapse the whole thing is at any given moment. We had a sever go down that controlled close to half the gates on base. The person that was supposed to know how to get it back up and running didn't know how so he had to spend 6 hours straight on the phone talking to people who did know how to do it. All the while we couldn't get fuel, we couldn't get a new tire, access to half the water was cut off, and two people were stuck in a room the size of a prison cell because they were the ones that fricked up the server because they were trying to fix the big fridge that held out milk.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      >For want of half-and-half the base was lost

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Servers don't control gates, they may authenticate IDs which would snarl things nicely. Further, any gate with an actuator can simply be disconnected then operated manually. Most bases don't have gates that open and shut for each vehicle. I've never seen one.

  17. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Worked on two carriers, and one amphib, all 7th fleet. AMA.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Should I run on a treadmill or outside on concrete?

      • 11 months ago
        Anonymous

        Concrete. Treadmill you might bounce like a trampoline.

        Buy good shoes. Put good inserts in them.

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Why is logistics so difficult and why can't other nations into logistics?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      What is point of life? Is there afterlife?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      What is the most difficult/complex underway logistics feat?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      which is more important, sealift or airlift?

    • 11 months ago
      Anonymous

      Have you ever seen a man eat his own head?

  18. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Logistics isn't particularly difficult, it's just expensive and lacks glamour.

    Rulers of third world shitholes don't actually care if their armies to be logistically competent, because they don't plan on conducting any real expeditionary warfare. They care far more about internal security than external. All those trucks and specialized vehicles required for successful expeditionary warfare, and the constant maintenance and training that goes along with it, are not only frightfully expensive, but they're boring. They'd rather have an army with a few cool toys like fighter jets and tanks that they can trot out for parades to look fearsome.

    The Soviets used to be good at logistics, but then it became another third world shithole. When the choice is between using the fuel budget to actually do training with, or to embezzle it, the generals in Russia will steal it every time.

  19. 11 months ago
    Anonymous

    Logistics? Hah! Real commanders learn battle tactics instead!

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