The whole thing makes me want to take up logistics. It’s high stakes, fascinating stuff where there’s high returns for actually solving problems properly.
I strongly endorse this. On LessWrong I see a reasonable awareness of communications and finance, but virtually none of logistics, and it is the third element that makes up the global economy. It is a tremendous torrent of object-level problems, and even introductory knowledge makes lots of other things much clearer. For example, military things make no sense sans logistics. But I don’t know anything about commercial logistics, so I would be excited to explore the object level question of how stuff moves from A to B here.
In the military case, I strongly recommend Supplying War by Martin van Creveld. It is a history, but systematically demolishes popular misconceptions about how supplies work in the military. It also completely changed my perspective of several important events, foremost among them Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and Operation Overlord in WWII.
Otherwise, I think that logistics is mostly divided up on the private side into different specializations by industry. For using the existing logistical infrastructure to manage supply, there is Supply Chain Management; international shipping and the railways are their own specializations; I suspect that things like building truckyards is actually a subtask of owning a trucking company more than anything else.
This calls for a high-level survey of the field, I think. Putting it on the TODO.
I strongly endorse this. On LessWrong I see a reasonable awareness of communications and finance, but virtually none of logistics, and it is the third element that makes up the global economy. It is a tremendous torrent of object-level problems, and even introductory knowledge makes lots of other things much clearer. For example, military things make no sense sans logistics. But I don’t know anything about commercial logistics, so I would be excited to explore the object level question of how stuff moves from A to B here.
Otherwise, any recommendations for learning about logistics? This is also an opportunity for someone to write a logistics sequence.
In the military case, I strongly recommend Supplying War by Martin van Creveld. It is a history, but systematically demolishes popular misconceptions about how supplies work in the military. It also completely changed my perspective of several important events, foremost among them Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and Operation Overlord in WWII.
Otherwise, I think that logistics is mostly divided up on the private side into different specializations by industry. For using the existing logistical infrastructure to manage supply, there is Supply Chain Management; international shipping and the railways are their own specializations; I suspect that things like building truckyards is actually a subtask of owning a trucking company more than anything else.
This calls for a high-level survey of the field, I think. Putting it on the TODO.