All organisations - military or civilian; buying/selling/supplying fighter jets or training shoes - face similar challenges in supply chain. This is the view - and long experience - of John McFall, founder of the consultancy SupplyChainWise. Before going it alone, John served in the RAF for 18 years - including tours in Afghanistan and Iraq - and then ran logistics for Amazon Web Services in Europe.

WHAT'S THE SAME: tier 1 relationships with those close to you are close and personal; those further away - tier 3s, tier 4s - are much harder. If all tier 1s use the same tier 4 supplier, that exposes the buyer to risks that they just can't see. There are similarities, too, if you're either buying outright or acquiring over time or on a pay-per-use model. Plus, procurement people tend to want to manage procurement using data - and Excel, the key tool, despite all the sophisticated tools that exist - whether they're in the military or business.

WHAT'S DIFFERENT: in a business, it's about profitability first and foremost, and "just on time" supply is critical, whereas in a military context, "just on time" will ALWAYS be too late. This means that, in military logistics, there are much more detailed contingency plans, with large volumes of inventory (of munitions and/or medical supplies, for instance) held in store "just in case". That would be problematic for most sectors of industry. In the civilian world, there are many more knowns; in military, many more unknowns. PLUS in insurgencies or conflict zones, human lives are always at risk. And inventory can easily be destroyed.