this strategy worked to keep Ukraine alive, by enabling them to throw literally anything and everything they could obtain into the fight. And the system enabled rapid experimentation and evolution of what works. Also they didn't have enough of anything to equip all units equally or fully, so a market-like system of was also a way to triage short supply.
However the logistics costs of fragmentation are very real (relevant to the supply chain theme of this story). And now that Ukraine is producing the better part of 10 millions(!) of drones per year, they are shifting towards more standardized drone models to simplify logistics, achieve more economies of scale and also now to have the capacity to keep units equipped more evenly and reliably.
Reminds me of the Cambrian revolution: suddenly there were all kinds of weird animals. Many of these kinds rapidly disappeared, while a few more successful ones kept on. Or at least that's my reading.
Look at 1950s aircraft. That was the decade of really weird aircraft, as people figured out how jets were supposed to work. Supersonics. VTOL aircraft. The X-planes. Rocket-assisted takeoff. After that, more was known about what worked, and designs became more similar.
For more reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion
There's something hilarious, in the truly cosmic sense of the word, about discussing an "explosion" that spanned between 10 to 25 millions of years of its duration.
Wonder how xenoanthropologists will discuss the "simian explosion" that we're currently experiencing (barely 300,000 years old ATM).
Wouldn't a fragmented, decentralized system also help make their supply chains more resilient? If they had a single large drone factory, it would be a sizable target.
During WW2 in the United States, you had all sorts of consumer goods companies reorganized to output a prodigious amount of military supplies. There were multiple companies making the same model of things, with fairly rigorous QA to ensure quality and uniformity.
For example, the BC-348 receiver, widely used in aircraft, was produced initially by RCA, and eventually "farmed out" to 3 other manufacturers.
More than 4 million M1903 Springfield Rifle were produced by the Smith-Corona typewriter company.
Here's a really good example, look at how the production of proximity fuzes, was distributed.[1]
The key thing is to have second sources for everything. Something the US military seems to have forgotten, or decided to ignore in their pursuit of gold-plated weapons systems that give the most kick-backs.
[1] https://usautoindustryworldwartwo.com/vtproximityfuze.htm
It's not a great comparison because Germany could not hit the US mainland. Even if there had been a single giant everything factory it wouldn't have mattered.
IIRC the US did plan in case either Japan or Germany somehow became capable of bombing the states. Some factories had their roofs painted to make them blend in with the surroundings, others were built out of reinforced concrete to make them bomb proof
https://airmail.news/arts-intel/highlights/masters-of-disgui...
One design doesn't mean one factory. And it's not about one design anyway, just the thought of culling the less performing ones.
It’s more brutal than that.
The Sherman tank wasn’t the best tank, but being able to make a lot of them was useful.
As per Stalin, quantity has a quality all of its own.
I've heard exactly this argument about the Soviet T-34.