Supply Chain

Supply chain is the physical network that moves materials and parts to the point of use. The pages that cite it share a view that this layer is underappreciated and often fragile. Two kinds of material are filed here.

Industry books. Most of the references are anti-library cards, many from One Book That Explains an Industry (Will Manidis’s Thread), each tracing one industry’s supply chain: The Box (the shipping container), Maritime Economics (shipping), Material World (sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, lithium), The War Below (lithium, copper and cobalt mines), Merchants of Grain (the five family trading houses that moved most of the world’s grain), Frostbite (the refrigerated cold chain), The Secret Life of Groceries (the supermarket reported as a supply chain), Fast Food Nation, The Emperors of Chocolate, Oil 101 and The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel. The common thread is infrastructure that is invisible to the end customer yet shapes what is made where.

Defense and industrial supply. The saved tweets and podcasts tie supply chains to reindustrialization: a reminder that most American OEMs have “basically zero supply chain visibility” and that third-tier parts are largely Chinese (Aaron Slodov); a post that most of Lockheed Martin’s suppliers are small shops, with $36B a year flowing to 13,000+ suppliers across all 50 states (Defense Industrial Base); and 300 Pages on Anduril — Inside Modern Warfare, which links it to Industrial Policy and Manufacturing and to the thesis that military superiority is front-run by industrial superiority. Arsenal-1 is Anduril’s manufacturing plant. The State of Adventure Capital lists supply chain among the end markets it expects investors to pursue.

Companies. A saved thread lists supply-chain tech startups, and Factor.io (purchasing and supplier management for manufacturers) and Emitwise (carbon accounting) are company pages that link here. See also Funding the Future, Deglobalization and Globalization.

Where this appears

• Some Really Interesting Supply Chain… (tweet)
• You Probably Have Not Heard… (tweet)
• Most American OEMs Have Basically… (tweet)

Anti-library: The Box, Maritime Economics, Material World, The War Below, Merchants of Grain, Frostbite, The Secret Life of Groceries, Fast Food Nation, The Emperors of Chocolate, Oil 101, The Making, Shaping and Treating of Steel, Mobilize

Podcasts: 300 Pages on Anduril — Inside Modern Warfare, Funding the Future

Long reads: The State of Adventure Capital, The Mindset Shift We Need to Rebuild

Concepts, people, companies: Lockheed Martin, Arsenal-1, Aaron Slodov, Factor.io, Emitwise