The US Military’s Massive Global Transportation System
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a clear overview of military logistics, often as a contrast with civilian infrastructure efforts.
What it is
Wendover Productions explains how the US military moves people and materiel worldwide, including prepositioned equipment, sealift and airlift. It shows the scale of the logistics system behind US force projection.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec rtkwe · 2023-02 · on “Consultants, The real reason it costs so much to build new subways in America”
The US could cut back and still compete in the West Pacific/South China see but it would have to focus there very heavily to the detriment of the existing implied obligations to NATO. Part of the US's politically dominant position post WW2 is that we've signed ourselves up to be anywhere in the world fighting a large scale conflict inside of a month with huge stockpiles of everything you need to fight all over the world, including one floating one that can backup the standard land based prepositioned stocks. [0] Granted a lot of that was also enabled by being the only major economy not significantly bombed through the war but that advantage was heavily invested in since then. [0] Wendover Pr
Recommends rsj_hn · 2022-11 · on “The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted the F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed”
I'm really worried that cheap, abundant and reliable is not something our defense industry is capable of. - As a result of deindustrialization, we can't ramp up production of critical components. We make up for that by prepositioning supply depots around the world, and these depots allow a brigade or so to fight for a few weeks. But once that runs out, things get hairy. See this article: [LINK] which talks about "surge" capability after a four year ramp up time and also here: [LINK] - We have little sea lift capacity to move gear around to the hot spot even if we were able to produce it in large quantities. [LINK] see also [LINK] A nice summary of US military logistics is here: [this video] - US
Cites theshrike79 · 2025-05 · on “Finland announces migration of its rail network to international gauge”
Compare this to the completely bonkers logistics of the US Military: [this video] Even Unicef has a massive logistics center in Denmark with pallets of stuff categorised and ready to be sent for any emergency: [LINK]