The past few years have shed a harsh light on the fragility of supply chains in extraordinary situations. After the pandemic which has brought its share of shortages and continues to considerably slow down certain industries, it is the war in Ukraine which is particularly damaging that of the Russian army.
In a podcast, Bloomberg looked at one specific aspect of this supply chain: pallets. Used to transport just about any commodity imaginable, wooden pallets are the backbone of all global logistics, including military.
The reason why pallets are so important, Marshall White, a Virginia Tech professor specializing in the subject, explains to Bloomberg, is that they delay the moment of individual handling as much as possible: since package-by-package transport is slower, the more a supply chain is able to keep its goods bundled downstream, the more efficient it is.
For a commercial supply chain, the interest of this efficiency is above all to reduce costs. For an army, for whom costs are secondary, it allows soldiers not only to win, but above all to survive on the front line.
Palette it be
Ideally, weapons, ammunition, clothing, food, medical equipment and fuel arrive bundled on the battlefield, in order to be quickly distributed in the hands of the combatants.
However, it seems that Russia is having difficulty organizing this supply, in particular because it has not succeeded in constituting sufficient stocks of pallets beforehand, in a context of great market tension.
The Ukrainian military has focused much of its strategy on destroying ground vehicles using man-portable anti-tank missiles. We can add to this the many vehicles bogged down or deprived of fuel: social networks are full of images of Russian supply trucks abandoned in the open countryside. And in many of them the ammunition boxes seem to have been stacked loose.
Similarly, very few trucks are equipped with cranes or mechanisms to quickly load a large amount of equipment. This means they take longer to charge, so they have less to ride.
In one day, if a truck has to travel 145 kilometers between the place of loading and the front, it can make about four round trips while being loaded mechanically, explains Trent Telenko, a former American Defense employee. Hand-loaded trucks must be limited to three round trips. Meanwhile, the soldiers are hungry and low on ammunition.
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