No one knows what is being supplied, Steve, because it is primarily “local purchase” and in the Persian Gulf, that means from everywhere because they don’t grow a lot of food in the desert, and the agricultural regions of Iraq keep getting blown up.

The uniforms in the Pentagon all know this, it’s drummed into them at staff college. It’s the suits that keep refusing to plan.

The late great Molly Ivins used to say something like your Heinlein quote, to the effect that alleged conspiracies were usually more easily explained as a combination of incompetence and bad luck. For one rare time, I believe Molly was wrong: we are witnessing the playing out of conspiracy, incompetence and bad luck, all three at the same time.

As to the privatized logistics system, that has to be one of the dumbfuckingest ideas of all time. One would think that a conspiracy depending for its very existence on military power would at least have a few military experts on board to tell them that. But noooo…