Boots, Beans and Bullets

Army logistics are sometimes referred to as "boots, beans and bullets". The boots refer to the men and their gear. The beans refer to food, and the bullets refer to ammunition. If there's a failure to supply any of these three the war is lost.

Seen in this context, it's enlightening to hear NATO chairman Jens Stoltenberg talk about the West's failure to deliver sufficient ammunition to the Ukraine-Russian front line. Ukraine is running low on artillery shells, which is concerning because the Russians have managed to turn the war into an artillery war.

The current war is looking more and more like the first world war, with artillery playing the major role. This is a strategic victory for Russia, because they have spent the past decades preparing for just such a war. They have perfected their artillery and they have stockpiled vast amounts of ammunition, so much so that they are spending more ammunition per day than NATO produces in a month.

NATO, on the other hand has been busy producing advanced modern equipment, and has hardly any stockpile of artillery shells. When I was in the Norwegian Navy back in the early 1980s, we made a point of spending all our ammunition at the end of the year so that our stockpiles would be low for next year's budget.

From an industrial perspective, this was ideal in that it allowed the commanders to grow their budgets without simultaneously grow their need for storage capacities. However, we now see that the Russians chose a different strategy that is now paying off. Instead of keeping their ammunition stockpiles low for budgetary reasons, they chose to pile it up in bunkers for later use.

Decades old ammunition is now being spent by the Russians, while NATO is running low. NATO will have to dramatically increase their production capabilities while the Russians can increase their scale of production in a more organic way.

This development reveals the strategic thinking of the Russians. They accurately assessed that NATO had enough artillery shells to last them a year, after which they'll have to ramp up production by orders of magnitude to keep up with demand. All the Russians had to do was to keep the war confined to artillery, and to lock the enemy in perpetual exchange for a year.

This development has no doubt caught the attention of the Chinese. They must see the Russian strategy as a winning one. But their concern may not be artillery. A war with Taiwan would require ships and air support. Artillery will only be deployed after a successful landing. However, some draining tactic may still be the way to go. Swamping the skies with cheap military gear that Americans will have to constantly shoot down would do the trick. When the Americans run out of ammo, the game is up and Taiwan falls.

Mark Esper with Jens Stoltenberg

By U.S. Secretary of Defense - 200212-D-AP390-6107, CC BY 2.0, Link