NPR

Rifles, drones, missiles, weapons of war. In recent days the US and NATO members have been sending military equipment to Ukraine by the TUN.

The US and NATO have promised more weapons to Ukraine but actually delivering on that promise can be complicated.

Vince Castillo knows this firsthand. In the late 2000s Vince was a US Army soldier deployed in Iraq and he let a platoon responsible for providing security for shipments of military equipment.

The term that we use was combat logistics patrols or a clip of CLP and so I gained a lot of experience escorting goods in an active combat zone.

This is the indicator for plenty of money. I'm Adrian Ma.

I'm Stacey Vanick Smith. What does it take to deliver weapons into a war zone? Vince's the process shares a lot of similarities with the supply chains for online retailers like Amazon or Walmart.

Except in this case the stakes are much much higher.

We're not talking about a late delivery. We're talking about a country trying to protect its savantry.

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When Vince Castillo was in Iraq doing combat logistics patrols, he says his responsibility was basically figuring out how to get the right stuff in the right quantity to the right place at the right time.

It sounds like you were basically doing the job of a logistician.

Yeah, and the thing is I wasn't a logistics officer. I was an infantry officer, but I guess that was the first time in my career where I started dabbling in logistics.

After his deployment in Iraq, Vince eventually transitioned out of the military and didn't really feel like getting a real job.

So I decided to become an academic.

He went on to become a logistics professor at the Ohio State University where he studies things like online retail.

And lately, as he's been watching news about country sending weapons to Ukraine, he's had this thought.

There are a lot of similarities between the military supply chain and commercial supply chains, like those supply chains that allow us to be able to receive online orders right on our doorsteps.

When they're working correctly, you'd never know they're there. But when things are going wrong, the pain is felt everywhere.

Vince says the e-commerce supply chain provides a rough analogy for understanding how weapons are making their way into Ukraine.

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