Elementary, My Dear Watson:

Whether you picture Basil Rathbone or Benedict Cumberbatch (or Jonny Lee Miller, for that matter) when hearing or seeing the signature patrician and dismissive phrase, there is no question that the arrogant and supercilious super-sleuth is involved. Whenever something either obvious, self-evident, or already genrally accepted is delivered in the "right" annoying tones, the appropriate response is a choice of the silent or the plain-spoken rebuff, "No (insert pejorataive implication here), Sherlock".

With the awkwardly stilted prose of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in mind, comes news of a well-known university's latest deep thought. The institution cannot be named, but its color is essentially Gatorade orange. And, its research breakthrough is devoted to the notion that some logistics locations and facilities may be a touch fragile in a world of geopolitical and natural upset.

As amazed as the university appears to be by this realization, I am even more amazed that its crack researchers are amazed by the findings. We need not go far back in time to be reminded that MIT's Yossi Sheffi treated the subject definitively in 2005, unrelated to but immediately following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. With our collective attention span of a not-quite-bright two-year old, we have magically rediscovered the core of risk management and The Resilient Enterprise in the past couple of years. What happened? Was the then-landmark publication a work of fiction? Or a children's chapter book?

Look, this is all part of an endless continuum. 9/11, some fourteen years ago, taught vital lessons, which we promptly forgot - or ignored. Perhaps the exemplars were not free-standing distribution facilities, but, putting location aside for a moment, we faced Herculean efforts in restoring logistics and supply chain infrastructures in physical movement and connectivity.

But, these are only recent illustrations of tragedies and disasters with logistics and supply chain consequences. The Kodiak earthquake and tsunami of some fifty years ago are apparently beyond memory and recall. No wonder the more recent Asian tsunami and its frightening lessons have been out behind us.

It goes back farther. The legendary Johnstown Flood obliterated a great swath of Pennsylvania in 1889. A few years earlier, John Brown led a raid on a government armory. Talk about vulnerability - a store of arms subject to seizure by a ragtag band of social activists untutored in the arts of combat.

A never-ending story, so to speak. The folly of building a city in the shadow of a volcano. How did storehouses in Pompeii make out in the aftermath? A sea parting long enough to swallow a Pharoah's armies? That a level of planning to recognize facility and access vulnerability has not been a critical component of preparation for several generations is what is truly remarkable.

That, for example, events in The Levant and surrounding neighborhoods exacerbates risks is a puny excuse to begin paying attention. The War To End All Wars began about a hundred years ago, with a proximate event being the assassination of an obscure noblemen. The planet, at least the portion we considere to be civilized, was consumed by the conflagration, and suddenly everything was vulnerable, and nations and economies wwre staggeringly fragile.

How many researchers looking in the rear-view mirror seeking insight into the future will it take to put "new" discoveries into context?